“Do you have any customers in the city?”
“We do, but that’s not where he went. He always said he was flying to upstate New York. Pasco is waiting for thewarrant on his credit card activity so we can see where, exactly, he went.” She pointed to last month’s calendar. “And there’s this. Every day, he had a meeting from one to three p.m.”
“Every day? Like a team meeting?”
She shook her head. “It happened during the workday, but no one else at the company was attending. I didn’t keep track of his daily activities, so I didn’t notice—other than a couple of times I tried to schedule late lunch meetings, and he said he was busy. And it goes back seven months.”
“Two hours a day, every day, for seven months?”
“Including weekends.” She sifted through a pile and pulled out another sheet. “They actually go back more than another year, but they were more sporadic.”
I sat back in the chair. “As in, around the time of your mother’s death.”
“Before that.”
She pursed her lips and stared at one of the calendar pages. I knew that look from back in high school. She was piecing something together. I stayed silent so as not to interrupt her.
“Things did change, though, when I moved east for those six months.” She shuffled through the papers. “More meetings, a handful of trips I knew about… Who knows how many I didn’t? And remember, he replaced our accounting firm.”
“He brought in accountants who were loyal to him, not you. So, a good old-fashioned embezzling scheme?”
She shook her head. “Pasco and I looked at the possibility from all angles. That explanation didn’t align with the money movement, which looks a hell of a lot like money laundering. We just can’t figure out where the hell it’s coming from or going to. There has to be something here I’m not seeing.”
I stared down at the calendar page in my hand. “I thinkthere is.” I pointed to a block on the calendar. “Before and after work hours, he has these blocks marked as personal.”
She looked at it. “Well, he had workouts, maybe other things.”
“Two hours every morning and another two every night? Sav, that’s six hours a day, on top of being CEO of a business, and flying to upstate New York, what, twice a month. Was the guy exhausted?”
“Come to think of it, he was. And stressed and on edge. We looked for evidence of a gambling or drug problem, but couldn’t find either.”
Something had taken six hours of Devlin’s time every day, plus two weekends a month. His time. The company’s money. Someone was controlling him. As preparation for our ops, we’d be trained on psychological aspects of our enemy combatants. Basically, why they did what they did. Sometimes they were mercenaries or following orders for the homeland. Sometimes they were zealots for someone or something. True believers. They were groomed, broken down bit by bit. Rebuilt to give their all to the leader or the cause.
“Sav, think back, even before you moved east for those six months. Did anything weird happen with Devlin? Did he seem off in any way? Did you have any strange or disturbing interactions?”
“No, not that I remember.” She furrowed her brow. “There was one thing. We’d both been on the East Coast for some meetings, and he talked me into taking a weekend-long business seminar with him.”
I sat up straighter. “And something weird happened?”
“It was supposed to be three days long. I barely made it through the first day. Over dinner that night, I told Devlin I was bagging the rest of it and heading home. I assumed he would have the same reaction as me and do the same, but he didn’t.”
“What did you react to?” I asked.
“It’s hard to describe. It was just off. The instructors were presenting some pretty basic management principles to us, but they’d given them different names and acted like they’d discovered some secret key to success. And the way they went on about the guy who’d founded the training company. I jokingly told Devlin it was like they’d found the second coming of Christ. He said he agreed it was a little strange.”
“But he stayed for three days.” I knew from my training that everyone had a breaking point, and there were more ways to break someone than torture. “Three days is plenty of time to start the process. Next, they probably invited Devlin for a week-long training, and then more and more.”
“Maybe. He mentioned it a few times after that, but I shut him down. And then everything happened with my mom, and when I finally went back to California…” Her voice tapered off.
“Sav, what is it?”
She licked her lips, then threw back the last bit of her whiskey. “He was different. Over-the-top concerned for me, taking care of every little thing. I was flattered. And then he started bringing me lunch and dinner, and the next thing I knew,” she looked away from me, “we were dating. It only lasted a couple of months.”
“Oh.” Of course, she’d had a life in the past seven years. I knew that. And I knew that asshole Devlin would make a move eventually. I was surprised it took so long. Then again… “He was waiting until you were at your most vulnerable. Did he mention that group again while you dated?”
“Not that group, but… Maybe. He mentioned an executive consulting company he wanted to bring in for a week-long staff training. It sounded like a different kind, of course, so I assumed it was a different group. But I did remind him of our previous experience with the people who treated their founder as the second coming. I think I laughed. And then”—she widened her eyes and looked at me—“and then we argued. That argument ended our dating relationship.”
“What was the name of the group?”
