Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  “I’ll find a way to destroy you, Mitch. When I’m done with you, you won’t be able to walk into a church building anywhere in the world. You think anybody will believe you over me? You could have mountains of proof, and nobody would believe I’m capable of anything less than perfection, and you’d get crucified for daring to suggest that I am—starting with your father-in-law and the stake president.”

  “Aaannd while you’re trying to figure out how to do that, I’ll be turning your life inside out and upside down, finding all your little schemes, starting with Jep Industries. Let’s see who finishes first.”

  “Don’t play chicken with me, Mitch,” he growled. “You’ll lose, just like the Rohms. Just like Senator Oth.”

  Mitch smirked. “Do your worst.”

  Greg turned in a fury, but his demeanor changed the instant he opened Mitch’s office door and stepped out in the hall to find a cadre of teenagers awaiting him. “All right, guys,” he boomed, as jovial as always, “Now we can get back to the fun.”

  The excited chatter dimmed with the close of the door, and Mitch picked up his phone. “Sebastian,” he said without preamble. “I know you’re up to your eyeballs in problems right now, but we need to go over those Jep Industries documents again. ASAP.”

  “Uh,” said the man on the other end of the phone after a long pause. “Why? It’s been six years. We’ve gone through those a million times.”

  “I have something to look for now. Guy in my ward, one of the HR execs we didn’t rehire. He was in on it. I just can’t prove it.”

  Sebastian put him on speakerphone. “Name?”

  “Greg Sitkaris.”

  Keyboard clicks. Mouse clicks. “Okay, I see him, but nothing pops out at me. What are you thinking?”

  “I want to get together. Lay it all out with the new information, re-map it. And the sooner the better.”

  “So what did he do? Why now?”

  Mitch hesitated, wondering how much he could say. Being a bishop held the same responsibility of confidentiality that every other ecclesiastical position did. But in this case...

  “One of the foundry’s foremen— He’s a bishop of another ward. Two weeks ago he tells me about a family in his ward whose financial situation isn’t adding up, and Greg’s name kept popping up. I took the liberty of having my people check into this family’s situation, and all roads point to some annuities Greg sold them—”

  “But that’s not illegal,” Sebastian said with some impatience, and Mitch could tell his attention was beginning to wander. “And annuities are notoriously bad instruments to begin with. Caveat emptor.”

  “Sebastian!” he snapped. “Stay with me. This is important.”

  Pause. “Sorry.”

  “Once the new information is added in to what we already have, it turns into a different picture. I just don’t have a clear idea of that picture. I want us all there so we can brainstorm.”

  Silence, except for the sound of a fingertip tapping on wood. Finally, Sebastian said, “Okay. We can do that, but not in the next couple of weeks. I’m trying to hold Knox together while the media drags him through the mud over Vanessa.”

  Mitch felt a thud deep in the pit of his stomach. The stake president would demand to know why Mitch had released Greg from such a key position in the ward, and Mitch had hoped to have figured it out before that happened.

  “You’re going to Whittaker House for Thanksgiving, right?”

  “Of course.” Mitch only wished Mina had been well enough long enough for him to have taken her to Whittaker House Inn, in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks. It was only a hundred miles southwest of Rolla, the town where he and Mina had truly, finally fallen in love and spent eight years, where they’d built their life and family.

  Mina would have adored it.

  Under normal circumstances, Mitch would have never gone to one of Vanessa Whittaker’s holiday masquerades, with Mina or without. Those parties were way too decadent for his comfort zone, but this time, his attendance was necessary. Vanessa was mired in media mud and nursing a broken heart, to boot. She needed all the support she could get, and he owed her for the sweetly quiet way she’d taken care of him this past year.

  “We can do it then,” Sebastian was saying. “Bring what you have. See if you can gather more. We can spend the weekend going over it all. That okay?”

  No. Possibly too little. Definitely too late.

  Mitch couldn’t even enjoy the thought of finally solving this riddle and putting Greg in jail because of the dread settling over him. He’d bested Greg for almost twenty-five years, time after time, and his winning streak had to end somehow.

  Mitch knew this would be it, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Sebastian drawled after a split second. “There’s something else going on.”

  Not for the first time Mitch wished he could lie to his best friend as well as he could lie to the rest of the world. “I just released him from the Young Men’s presidency.”

  “And?”

  “He wants to be bishop. Always has. And...compared to him, I have a bit of a credibility problem.”

  Sebastian grunted. “Because of us.”

  “That and Greg is...charismatic. In the charlatan televangelist way. Whole ward loves him, especially the kids. He plays golf with the stake president and softball with three quarters of the stake high council. My father-in-law’s still in love with him, and you know how Shane feels about me.

  “But he’s also got his daughter wrapped up in knots, his wife is a little too Stepford for my comfort, and the few people who understand what he is stay far, far away from him. It’s been explained to me, but I never got it until lately. I started really watching him, tracking his behavior through the way other people act and treat each other. He can stir up trouble without seeming to and make it seem like everybody else’s fault.”

  “Oh, I get it. Like my Aunt Trudy. She could’ve gaslighted a frog.”

  “Yes, exactly. Gaslight. That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word.”

  “So what naïf called him to be Young Men’s president?”

  “Uh...that would be me,” Mitch muttered. “He’s useful. Does everything he’s asked and does it well. He’s heavy into Scouting, does all the high adventures in grand style. I wasn’t going to let that go to waste just because he and I have history.”

  “And you can’t stand him.”

  “It’s not that... It’s—” Mitch sighed. “I never knew him. Never thought about him enough to care. I’ve never looked past his act because it doesn’t affect me one way or another, and I was too busy with my life. Mina tried to explain it to me for years, but apparently I wasn’t listening.”

  More guilt.

  “And you’re worried about what he could do to you.”

  Mitch paused. “Not...professionally, no.”

  Sebastian laughed then, a booming laugh that made Mitch crack a reluctant grin. “Aw, c’mon, Elder. Have a little faith. This isn’t Paris, and we’re not twenty, getting dressed down by a mission president with the IQ of a crêpe. This guy has no power, no connections, and nowhere near the money you have. What’s the worst he can do?”

  * * * * *

  Lady Marmalade

  November 30, 2010

  My email dinged and the sender’s name shocked me.

  TO: cjsj@blackwoodsecurities.com

  FROM: SA Taight

  REPLY-TO: kingmidas@taight.com

  SUBJECT: [no subject]

  DATE: 11/30/10 2:11 PM EST

  Cassie,

  Even though you neither called me to rescue you from your cockeyed theories about my Fix-or-Raid Protocol nor presented yourself for my anointing as my ideological successor, I want you to reorganize the Hollander Steelworks/Jep Industries operation. Need it fast and I hear you specialize in fast. Please give me date and time we can get this done. Pref next week. Pref Mon. Pref 10am. Pref
@ Hollander’s office.

  SbnT

  kingmidas@taight.com

  What an ego that man possessed. But I laughed, delighted that he had come to me, albeit with the infamous arrogance that he could snap his fingers and the financial world would jump.

  I hit REPLY.

  TO: kingmidas@taight.com

  CC: jack@blackwoodsecurities.com

  FROM: Cassandra J. St. James

  SUBJECT: How high? Re: [no subject]

  I would prefer Monday next, 10 a.m., Hollander’s office. Please make the appropriate arrangements.

  St. James

  It took me the rest of the day to clear my calendar, and it took my assistant that long to get the file storage service to promise a rush delivery. When they had stacked at least a dozen banker’s boxes in my corner office suite the next morning, Susan and I looked at each other in dismay.

  “Uh...” The head of the corporate bond department stood in the door of my office staring at the carnage.

  “New project,” I said when I realized Melinda had arrived to whisk Susan away so they could watch their favorite cooking show—Vittles: Gourmet Roadkill and Weeds—together. “I need her right now, so DVR it.”

  “What project?”

  “It appears that Hollander Steelworks can no longer support the old Jep Industries operation by itself and needs to be cut loose.”

  “Oh,” Melinda said, blinking. “That’s...interesting.”

  “Want to help?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “I have about as much interest in restructuring as you have in bonds. Plus, I have plans for the weekend and they do not include—” She waved a hand. “That.”

  “Okay, then,” I said pointedly. “Bye.”

  Melinda left in a huff, and Susan and I set to work sorting and sifting, finding all the documents I needed.

  I’d been through most of them in the last four years, but my assistant hadn’t, and she needed to know the whole story so she could help me. Finally, we had the boxes organized enough that we could plant ourselves on the floor and start digging. Susan settled in as if I were going to spin a magical financial yarn for her pleasure.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, flashing her a smile. She grinned back at me in appreciation. I wondered what it would be like for one of my daughters to happily listen to a story I wanted to tell while we worked on a project together.

  “You know who Senator Roger Oth is, right?” I said.

  She nodded. “He’s an imbecile.”

  “Exactly. He was the owner and CEO of Jep Industries about, oh, seven years ago. He inherited it and really didn’t have a clue what he was doing. One of those silver-spoon types. Like me, only stupid.” Susan laughed. “Anyway, J.I. ended up in a hole Roger couldn’t pull it out of and he had to call Sebastian Taight to fix it.”

  “And Mr. Taight raided it instead.”

  “Well, kind of.”

  It wasn’t King Midas’s usual modus operandi, and had taken everyone by surprise. Usually when Taight was called to restructure a company, it took a while; no one understood why he did what he did or why it took him so long to do it, but his method worked. When he finished with a company, he left it lean and strong, and—more importantly—it stayed that way. It would take a year or more for Wall Street to find out if he would initiate a hostile takeover, which happened often enough that the betting pools opened as soon as he stepped foot on a property.

  “The first thing that tipped everybody off that this wasn’t his normal process,” I said absently as I thumbed through the files, “was that he called his family in immediately.”

  “His family?”

  “Morgan Ashworth. Knox—”

  “Morgan Ashworth, the writer? He’s related to King Midas?”

  “He’s not a writer. He had a few good ideas and hired a team of ghostwriters and marketers. He’s an economist who’s been politically disenfranchised for the last few years. He basically—” I laughed and reached for another folder. “He shrugged.”

  Susan groaned at my bad joke, then said, “I’ve seen him. Well, his picture. On the back of his books. He’s hot.”

  “And gay.”

  She sighed and I chuckled, unable to blame her.

  “Then,” I said, and threw a file in a box, “there’s Knox Hilliard.”

  “The OKH Enterprises heir? The one who had to fulfill all those crazy conditions to inherit the company?”

  “Yes. The one who had to get married and have a living child before he was forty, which nobody thought he’d do after his uncle—Fen Hilliard—killed Knox’s fiancée and tried to kill the woman Knox would’ve married as a last resort.”

  “I can’t imagine a company being important enough to kill people over.”

  “Ah, well. Fen had built a billion-dollar empire from a ghetto one-guy shop and he loved it. I can understand how he felt about losing it to somebody who didn’t want it but felt obliged to take it.”

  “Enough to kill for it, though? Really?”

  I pursed my lips. “Of course not. But by the time Fen decided to kill Knox, he’d already lost the company. If Fen couldn’t have it, neither could Knox. Fen just wanted to make sure he took Knox with him to hell—and he almost succeeded. Knox had no pulse for a couple of hours after he was shot. In fact, he was still in the morgue when his mother committed suicide.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad.”

  “It really is.”

  “Does that have anything to do with Jep Industries and Hollander Steelworks?”

  “Only marginally.” Then I really started to warm up to the tale. It was a sexy story and I wanted to tell it. “Ashworth and Hilliard—Knox, not Fen—are Sebastian’s cousins. Hilliard’s a specialist in prosecuting white-collar crimes and he’s a magician with numbers. Sebastian only calls him in when he suspects theft. He calls on Ashworth when he needs an assessment of the greater economic impact of a company failing completely.”

  “Which meant there was a chance that could happen.”

  “Right. The fact that he called them in immediately meant the situation was about to blow up and devastate a huge portion of the economy.” Indeed, a Jep Industries failure would have rocked the core of American industry. J.I. bought at least half of Hollander Steelworks’s annual output of steel to manufacture thousands of metal parts from the mundane (nuts and washers) to the magnificent (tuned mass dampers). Jep Industries was the BASF of metal-parts manufacturing: J.I. didn’t build anything; they made the products used to build everything.

  I would have continued to talk, but my mouth was getting dry. “Want anything?” I asked as I stood to get something to drink.

  “Cassie,” Susan pleaded, hopping to her feet. “Let me do it.”

  “Water, then,” I said, and let her go. It embarrassed her when I got her a drink or brought her lunch, but I knew what she liked and if I wanted to go out... I saw no reason to cater to her sense of corporate propriety over my sense of efficiency.

  I stretched. Checked email. Made a phone call.

  Wondered if I had yet come to a place in my life where I could contemplate having an affair.

  Even though you neither called me to rescue you from your cockeyed theories about my Fix-or-Raid Protocol...

  Oh my, and had I ever needed rescuing from my advisor—an asshole professor who didn’t think a rich Upper East Side divorced stay-at-home mom had any business cluttering up his MBA program.

  I hadn’t called King Midas to pull me out of business school with a diploma because he was beautiful and I couldn’t afford the distraction of attempting to break my long fast—especially with a man who’d ostensibly taken himself off the market a few years before.

  He probably would’ve brought his gorgeous wife and then I’d have had two people in my immediate vicinity reminding me how long it’d been since I’d had good sex from a man or woman—or both—and taking my attention away from getting my reworked thesis approved.

  Taight had managed to rescue me in absentia, how
ever, by alerting the CEO of Blackwood Securities as to my plight. Jack Blackwood had offered me a job after one evening with a thick dossier his investigators had compiled, my thesis, and my résumé. That, in turn, forced my advisor to reconsider his opinion of rich Upper East Side divorced stay-at-home moms.

  Or at least, one of them.

  Susan returned with water and we returned to our sorting.

  “Where was I?”

  “The part where you say you were kidding that Morgan Ashworth’s gay.”

  I laughed. “Ah, sorry, no can do.”

  “Rats. Okay, so... J.I. was bleeding money and...?”

  “Right. Roger Oth’s executives were stealing from him and they’d laid a crumb trail that would point to him as being—oh, the wing man, I guess—once they jumped ship and headed to Brazil. What nobody knew at the time was that Sebastian, Hilliard, and Ashworth were working around the clock to find out how and where that money was going and to stop it. The best they could do—because all the executives left the country the minute Hilliard found the crumb trail—was shut down Jep Industries.”

  “I thought that was what they were trying to avoid.”

  “They were, but the employees’ 401(k) accounts had been scheduled to drain to a Swiss bank account, and the accounts were locked with a dead man’s switch.”

  At Susan’s blank look, I had to backtrack.

  “If the accounts were accessed in bulk with one login by anyone other than the thieves, they would instantly transfer. It was possible to access one account at a time, which would allow any one employee to receive their funds should they leave before the scheme was set in motion.”

  “To keep anybody from suspecting.”

  “Right. Hilliard figured this out, so as soon as he had all the paperwork in place, Sebastian laid off all the workers. Before any employee was allowed to leave the building, they were directed to a computer, instructed to access their account, and roll it over into a different account. That left the thieves without most of the funds they were counting on.”