She hoped.
No, they wouldn’t. Every trap was perfectly set.
Dammit, this was all Emily’s fault.
Eighteen Months Ago
Garrett was working and Audrey was bored.
When Audrey got bored, her mind worked in overdrive. She hadsomany ideas, really great ideas, and when Garrett cameby tonight she would share them all with him. He would go through her targets one by one and help her pick the best one. He wassogood at that. And he never made her feel stupid if one of her ideas wasn’t great.
After all, she had hundreds of ideas,of courseone or two weren’t well thought out. But always, he would find her best idea and they would work together to plan the operation. Garrett called it a “con” but she didn’t like that word. It was too... common. This was an operation, a grand heist,an adventure!
She knew who she wanted to target—a convention of financial planners was coming in next week. She already had the reservation list downloaded from the system and had gone through all the names. She picked ten probable successes, ten men who would absolutely hit on her. But there was one shereallywanted to take down a couple pegs. He was all bragging about his daughter online. She got into Harvard Law. She was top of her class. She was engaged. She was blah-blah-blah. All fake for the world to see. Because Audrey knew that he would want to screw her, and she also knew he would pay anything to prevent his oh-so-perfect daughter from finding out.
Since she was done with her operational plans—she loved that phrase—Audrey went to social media. Checked out what her mother was up to... boring. Clicked through to her mother’s friends. Sophia got divorced—no surprise there, her husband had been keeping a mistress their entire marriage. Douglas married a trophy wife last year, who was now pregnant. Gross. Click. Click. Click.
She checked on her old boyfriends. She did so periodically, but didn’t tell Garrett. It wasn’t that Garrett would be upset, she didn’t think, but she didn’t want her husband to think she was still hung up on any of them. She wasn’t. She just wanted to know what they were doing.
Audrey nearly screamed when she saw Charlie’s most recent post. A photo of Emily. That bitch. With a man.
Congratulations to Emily and Josh! I’m so happy for you both to embark on your new life together.
Below that was an engagement announcement. Emily and Josh were getting married a year from now. In Florida.
Audrey dug deep into Emily’s life. She hadn’t given that bitch a second thought since she exposed her father as a cheater. Well, she had celebrated when Charlie finally came to his senses and left her not even two years after they got married. And now... she was getting marriedagainand Charlie washappyabout it?
Two hours later, Audrey had learned everything out there about Josh and Emily. They were moving to Florida because that’s where Josh was from, bought a house and everything! They were getting married at a church—could they even do that since Emily was divorced? Whatever. Audrey found out which church and maybe she could find a way to ruin the wedding—again. But she’d done that before, so it wouldn’t be as fun to do it again.
When Garrett got home she told him everything. He listened, then said, “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
She fell in love with him all over again. Because hegot her. Heloved her. Hetrusted her. Mostly, he thought she was smart.
Two months later, she did figure it out—after online stalking every person in Josh’s family to find out where they were going on their honeymoon.
Besides, it was getting a bit heated here in New Orleans. Time to slip away and find new jobs in a new state with a new plan.
The first of which was to find the right property for what she wanted to do. She couldn’t tell Garrett everything, but most lies had some truth, so when she told him her family had a run-down, abandoned property in southern Georgia that would be perfect for what they planned to do to Emily and Josh, he didn’t even question it.
She would take Emily Masters down a peg or ten, then she would kill her.
And have fun doing it.
Tuesday
22
When Michael walked into the resort conference room at five thirty that morning after getting not much more than three hours of sleep, Ryder was already sitting at his computer, hollow-eyed and pale with dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you sleep?” Michael asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Some,” Ryder said. Michael didn’t know if he believed that. “I’m tracing Garrett Reid’s last seven and a half years. I think I found something interesting in Scottsdale, where he worked at a resort for a year right after he left Los Angeles. A suspicious death.”
“Suspicious? Not a homicide?”
“The ME ruled it inconclusive, possible accidental drug overdose. But the suspicious part is that the deceased was the CEO of a Seattle-based tech company with no history of drug use, and the bartender told detectives that he had been flirting with an attractive woman in the bar.”
“Security footage?”
