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Life was a shell game. The winners could just hide the truth better than everybody else.
She walked upstairs and let herself back in using theduplicate key she’d had made. She had gotten the passcode to the firm’s security system by working as an office cleaner in the building for a week. And the security card she’d been given as a cleaner granted her access to the building at all times.
She walked behind the receptionist’s desk and curled her fingers around the sign there. The magnetized backing on the Styrofoam sign pulled free from the metal letters bolted into the wall.
Revealed was the name of the company that really called this place home.
Creative Engineering. A well-respected company with lots of projects worldwide.
She had come in earlier today and made sure nothing that said “Creative Engineering” was visible anywhere. She had led Crandall right to the conference room and then right out the front door. She felt like a stage director.
Enter and exit only when and where I say to.
It was a role she enjoyed.
She had learned that all the personnel from this office had been redeployed to Austin, Texas, for a special four-week project, which was why she had chosen this space for her “office.”
She broke her sign into two pieces and stuffed it into a large trash bag, then slipped her laptop into her briefcase. She next wiped her prints from every surface she had touched. She closed the door behind her and took the sign off the wall next to the exterior door. Underneath was, once more, revealed the name Creative Engineering.
But not as creative as me, I’d wager.
She added the small sign to the trash bag and left the building, but first took a moment to glance out the glass front door just to make sure Crandall had not doubled back.
Of course he hadn’t. Arrogance again. He was probably stopping off to get the pack of Trojans for their Wednesday dinner followed by a romp in a hotel room with her all drunk and helpless against his preening manliness.
She got into her rental car and drove off. She threw the trash bag away in a dumpster about two miles away.
By one o’clock the next day $2 million had been wired into the bank account of Laser Focus, which had been set up only two months earlier. Crandall’s banking people would have made certain he was really authorizing the wire because they needed to cover their asses. But it was not their job to make sure Crandall was not being scammed. That was all on him.
Thirty minutes later the money had been wired out, and the account was closed.
In the next five hours, the money would be divided up and sent to four different accounts around the world on preauthorized transfer instructions, until it disappeared into a sea of digital funds, never to be seen by its original owner again. But to be utilized fully by her.
She was on a commercial flight an hour after that. She didn’t like to fly private all the time. And she sometimes found marks in first class. That was where she had first met Crandall, on a red-eye to London, where she let him “innocently” caress her leg and arm on the night flight over the Atlantic. That was followed by a peck on the cheek, a hug that lingered a bit too long, all with the implicit understanding of much more to come if business could be done.
On the plane she had just been thinking about leaving IBM, she had told him. He had never checked, of course. Men like him never did. She had taken her time reeling him in on Laser Focus, a scam she had been working on for some time. She had put the website up and gotten the slide deck together and spent some of her money on dinners with just the two of them.
She had also introduced him to her twopartners, Bill and Joe. She had used them in the past for things like this. They weren’t cheap, but they adhered to the script like the pros they were, more than earning their compensation. During several meetings they had talked of financial projections and marketing plans and corporate org flowsheets and cost itemizations and hiring initiatives, and all sorts of business items ad nauseum. This had overwhelmed Crandall and caused him to finally stop asking questions and simply nod at their fancy-sounding gibberish lest he reveal that he actually knew very little about business.
It really was all in the psychology. If you knew what made your mark tick, you knew everything you needed to know. And playing to the mark’s ego was usually golden.
When she had learned while sitting next to Crandall in first class that his wealth had been inherited, her interest had been piqued. Those who inherited wealth either let the professionals handle the business matters while they simply enjoyed the benefits of being born into the right family, or else they went the route that Crandall did, convincing themselves that they had somehow earned every dollar and had the business acumen to earn even more.
Well, Phillip Crandall would have to content himself with the many millions he still had left. And knowing his ego, he might not even report being ripped off, because that would make public the fact that he was an idiot. But this also might be a nice wake-up call for him. He hopefully would take the rest of his huge fortune and put it into a proper stocks-and-bonds portfolio and let people who actually knew what they were doing manage it for him. That way he could spend his days driving around in his ego machine and chasing younger women until his pecker gave out.
She was much richer today than yesterday, but really only focused on one thing.
Where in the hell is my mother? And who took her? And what am I going to do about it?
CHAPTER28
A?ND PARENTS.
The clue had finally come to Gibson as she made pancakes for her kids while they impatiently watched her.
Clarisse had said,One can buy excellent day care if one has enough money. That goes for childrenandparents.
And days later she had taken a call, presumably unaware that Gibson could still hear. It seemed like a woman had gone missing.
