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I shrug. He didn’t, but I don’t want to derail what she has to say with a technicality that’s not important now.
“Did he also tell you that I was Barclay’s right-hand woman?” She nods. “I was the face of Reed Financial. Dad kept a few clients of his own, like Douglas Lund. Clients who had a lot of money and predated me joining the firm. But most he had shifted onto my plate. I managed the investment strategy for the entire organization. I looked at every client every week—sometimes every day—and made recommendations about what to invest, as well as when and where. I said when to buy, when to sell, and when to get out of the market and take shelter in bonds or other low-risk investments.”
I gape. She was in charge of everything? “People trusted you with their money and… Are you telling me you had a hand in taking it?”
“No. God, no. I’m trying to explain how everything went so wrong. Our organizational roles are what allowed the theft to happen. I have a securities’ license, but my father insisted on maintaining control of all actual transactions. He said it kept him familiar with where his clients were in their wealth-management plan and allowed us to have a system of checks and balances, which was especially important when I was fresh out of school and my knowledge about managing people’s money was still mostly theoretical. So my job encompassed more of the day-to-day operations—client meetings, risk assessment, and trade planning. He managed the organization itself and handled the execution of the clients’ investments. I could check the balance of any portfolio simply by logging in to the software we had built about three years ago. I didn’t see the funds, just tracked their growth or loss electronically. So I had every reason to believe they were exactly where I suggested he invest them.”
Is she saying her father duped her, too?
“So…you advised clients, took their capital, and recommended the strategy, but your dad actually handled the money?”
“Exactly. But ten months ago, I was working late one Thursday evening. It was, maybe, eight o’clock. Dad poked his head in my office and told me to leave. Not like he gently urged me to go home because it was past dinnertime, and I’d been working killer hours for months. He literally ordered me to get the hell out of the office. He looked nervous.”
“So you left?”
She nods. “Even if I was his ‘favorite’ offspring, as he liked to call me, he never quite let me forget that I was the illegitimate one. Most of his clients saw me as his brilliant investment strategist, whom he was probably banging. A few knew the truth, the ones I liked and trusted. Some of them, I really miss. They felt like friends.”
Does she count my dad among those few? If so, why didn’t she answer her phone that fateful day?
Her expression turns sad. “But I knew how most people viewed me. Sure, it irked and upset me. Sometimes that perception even undermined me, but my professional life was tied to Dad’s. Until I truly proved my worth in financial circles, no one was going to believe I wasn’t his something-something at the office since he had a reputation as a man-whore and I couldn’t prove my ancestry. It would have been my word against his. And I knew he could be a real bastard…but he was my father. I never thought he’d stab me in the back.” Tears well in her green eyes. “He did. And I didn’t see it coming because some part of me always wanted his approval, was always trying to overcome being his bastard daughter, even though that was his fault, not mine.” The silvery drops fall down her cheeks in wet paths in the moonlight. “I sound pathetic, like a stupid girl with Daddy issues. But I was accustomed to him and I thought I knew him well enough to believe that, on some level, he cared.” She drags in a breath. “Anyway, since bad moods were nothing new, I didn’t question him. I just picked up my things and left. After that, things started getting weird.”
“In what way?”
“He told me to cool down on the trades for a while, said he was flipping some funds around so he could protect them during what he thought would be a turbulent time in the market. When I pressed him, he admitted that he was moving money around because his wife was threatening to divorce him, and he didn’t want Linda to have half of his wealth. It wasn’t until a few months later, and only after he installed a safe in my condo and stuffed it full of his most incriminating files, that I realized he was actually offshoring not just his personal funds but the whole organization’s. He’d moved ninety-five percent of it to the Caymans without anyone knowing. He was positioning himself to take the money and disappear. But then Linda tried to serve him with divorce papers before he could finish what he started. He fled to Maui to evade her. Somehow, the FBI got suspicious—I think Douglas Lund had something to do with that—and they started investigating.” She laughs bitterly. “I defended my father for so long. I knew he was a selfish asshole, but even I was surprised he had so little compunction about stealing from clients. It hurt that he lied to me. But the worst part was that everything he put in my safe made it look as if I was the guilty one. He tried to set me up to take the fall.”
