Page 64 of Finding Love

CHAPTERTWENTY

Brook had no real clue what was going on. It had been almost two weeks since Faith had contacted Ryder and, currently, the house was full of people from Ryder’s company.

She was wearing a long blue cocktail dress and low heels. Her long hair was curled and pushed off to one side, showcasing the tan she’d been working on each day, lying by the pool with Willy.

Ryder had decided to host an elaborate going-away party before everything in the home was either packed up or sold. They were due back in Pride in two days so they could meet with Parker on the first phase of the remodel.

She walked around the home, happily playing host and meeting and talking with everyone that worked for Ryder.

She knew that there were about a dozen FBI agents in the house, most of whom were dressed as waitstaff or had mixed in with the crowd.

The FBI had decided to set a trap for Johnathan Reginald.

Currently, only two people at the company knew that Johnathan was Ryder’s younger brother. The first was Lindsey Jackson, head of the accounting department. She was working closely with the FBI on compiling the evidence. The other was Kelly Larchwood, Ryder’s secretary, who had made all of the arrangements for the party.

Brook had met both of the women prior to today’s events and liked each of them.

According to Lindsey’s calculations, John Reginald had gotten away with more than a quarter of a million dollars from Gallant Industries over the last year. He’d taken twice that from Ryder’s personal accounts.

Ryder had cursed himself a fool for not watching his accounts when he was on the road.

The fact that most of the money had been taken from Ryder personally made sense since he’d been out of touch for most of the yearlong hiatus. It was probably harder to keep the lost money from a firm that had an entire accounting department watching every penny.

Lindsey had been really good at matching every cent to where it belonged. Going back over everything, she realized that every dime that had been stolen from the business had been marked as transfer fees by one department head. Mark Lindgren.

Mark wasn’t at the party that day. Not only because he’d been fired when he’d punched Ryder, but because he was sitting in a federal jail cell awaiting arraignment.

Ryder let a few fake rumors spread that Mark had moved out of the city after he was fired. If John had any connections to Mark, that rumor would cover his absence.

So far Mark hadn’t exposed to the FBI just how he knew John or even if he’d helped the man in any way, other than covering up the missing money, a move that could have easily been to cover his own ass rather than to help John in any way.

She had never seen Ryder’s brother personally, but now understood how he’d gained control of Ryder’s laptop and the rest of the systems at Gallant the year before. It was easy when you were hired as head of the IT department, which he had been, shortly before Ryder took off. It didn’t help Mark’s case that he’d been the one who had hired John.

Thanks to her cousin Nick, they understood how John had gained access to their house. After the night of the break-in, Ryder’s neighbor had security cameras and a motion sensor installed on their dock so that no one could sneak onto Hunt’s Point from their property again.

Ryder and the FBI had been careful in the week and half prior to ensure that John wouldn’t get spooked and disappear before they could catch him. They had been busy compiling all the evidence and trying to get enough to make the arrest.

John had covered his tracks very well. If not for the information that he was Ryder’s brother, they would have never even looked at the man. He had been hired under the name Paul White, not John Reginald.

That was another ding against Mark. The application in the company’s files had so many holes in it.

The FBI were going off the assumption that John needed Ryder’s computer to gain access to Bitcoin funds through the encrypted key.

They believed that once he had it, he would disappear. They’d been watching the man’s every move.

She didn’t know why they believed he’d make his move during the party but figured she could at least enjoy the guests.

The FBI agents had pulled encrypted files from all of the workstations. More than a dozen other employees at the firm had been hit with the software. They were still trying to calculate just how much money John had gotten his hands on.

Ryder had opened other bank accounts and had moved most of his funds over to the new ones so that the amount being siphoned from his other accounts was limited and controlled. They didn’t want the cash flow to cease, just slow, so they didn’t tip off John.

The FBI was sure that they had enough evidence against him, if they could get proof that he was the one after the laptop.

They believed this move against Ryder was a very personal one.

Thankfully, Ryder’s laptop was now in the custody of the FBI. There was a duplicate laptop sitting in the middle of Ryder’s home office desk as a trap.

It had taken some doing, but thanks to John leaving the encrypted key on Ryder’s computer, the FBI had access to every penny that had been stolen from him and moved to the Bitcoin account, about a hundred thousand dollars. The rest had been deposited into other various accounts. All of which could be seized after John was in custody.