Page 8 of Fugitive Flirtation
“You’re right, but if he wanted to cheat Uncle Sam, he would have done it in a more clever way.”
“So the son?”
His question gives me hope. He’s actually the first one who seems ready to consider the possibility that I could be innocent. Even my attorney didn’t.
“Yeah, but I can’t wrap my head around him doing something like that,” I say.
Ace raises a questioning eyebrow.
“It’s not that David doesn’t want more money. He does. If you listen to him, Mr.Blackwell is not as generous as he should be considering how invested David is in the business.” I make air quote around the word invested. “What David’s invested in is his poker games with his buddies. He plays every single night. No one’s ever seen him at the office before noon. The truth is Blackwell Junior is a lazy ass. He’s also not the sharpest knife in the drawer. When he was in high school, he believed that some Nigerian prince on his death bed had picked him to be his heir…”
Ace rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, that’s how his college fund vanished.” I shake my head. “I don’t think he’s smart enough to…”
I stop mid sentence because now that I think about it, I’m wondering how hard it would be to open an account online in someone else’s name. Not that complicated if you have their personal data… to which he would have had access through my file at HR.
Ace brings me back to the present by asking, “What about you giving me facts instead of a hypothesis?”
“Facts…” I growl. “That’s easy: money was siphoned out of the corporation into an account that had been opened in my name, in a bank I had never heard about.”
“Okay.”
“I’m innocent…” I pause and rephrase. “I was innocent.”
Now Ace frowns.
“Well, since the account had been opened in my name, I did something to make sure it wouldn’t move again while I worked on clearing my name.”
“So you now have the money?” he asks.
“Let’s say that I know where it is.”
“Okay, now it makes more sense…”
Now I’m lost. “What makes more sense?”
“The guys chasing you.”
“Oh, right.” I sink next to him on the sofa and mull this over. “How did they find me?”
“The same way that I did.” Ace laughs. “Following the breadcrumbs you left on the net…”
“But… but…” My protest dies on my lips and now it’s my turn to laugh. “So much for me thinking I had covered my tracks.”
He reaches out and pats my hand. “Don’t feel bad; vanishing’s almost impossible these days.”
His touch sends a jolt of electricity through me.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure, ask away,” he says.
“To be a bounty hunter, you need investigative skills, right?”
“Yep.” He nods and stretches his arm on the back of the couch.
“Can people hire you to find out stuff?”