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“And none of this showed up in your investigations? Why did your uncle do business with a man he hadn’t researched?”
“Roy Green was a legitimate person, but we couldn’t ever understand why there were so many variations on his history, properties, and finances. My mistake was entrusting a wet-behind-the-ears PI to find the answers for us back then, which got us nowhere.
“That was the new PI who just called. It seems Tyson Randall used five Roy Greens and molded their information into one person, so they seemed legitimate. Hell, he even has a social security number and a driver's license under the name. When he contracted Uncle James, the company’s banking details were sent to him to make a payment into, which he did, but then he used them to hack into the account and withdraw what was in there.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Back then, the secretary for Owens Construction kept the money in one account. She paid invoices from it every two weeks and said it made it easier for her to keep track of who’d paid them and who still needed to be paid by the company.”
I winced. “I can’t say much. I wanted to do the same thing when I opened this place, but you told me about what’d happened, and I realized how stupid that would have been.”
He nodded, knowing full well I’d once been that green.
“Anyway, it takes a lot of money and a computer genius to pull that off. In fact, I didn’t think it was possible to do it, but now, after hearing the details from the new PI, we know it is.”
“They stopped just shy of a cavity search when I opened this place and bought the apartment. What the hell kind of computer tech does he have?”
Shingle was based in River North, a part of the City of Chicago known for its nightlife. It’d been an intelligent location decision, and my idea had been unique for the area, but even with a hefty down payment and proof that I could afford it, raising the capital hadn’t been a walk in the park. Shit, even buying my apartment in Lincoln Park had been stressful, and this guy had just conned his way into an identity, courtesy of someone who could use a computer? Fuck’s sake.
“A fucking genius,” Harry said simply. “But now we know who the real Roy Green is, it’s going to make finding out everything about Tyson Randall that much more interesting. Preliminary information says he’s been married three times and has eleven kids, and he just got married a fourth time two months ago.
“Part of me wonders if we should get someone to talk to his exes. Maybe we’ll find some information from them that we couldn’t find electronically while I find a computer tech who’s as good as the one Tyson has.”
Nodding absently, I touched back on my gut feeling that Eva’s mom wasn’t involved in the ways we thought, but was snapped out of it by Harry adding, “Now, you find where Connie hid the money, and he can join her behind bars.”
Ever feel like your loyalty is being pulled in two different directions? That’s how this felt.
Harry and his uncle were rightly pissed at the situation as he’d almost lost his construction business because of it all. If it hadn’t been for some kind investors jumping in to save a company that’d been handed down through four generations, they’d have lost it all.
As it was, the private construction business had sold shares on the stock market to survive, and at one point, forty-eight percent of it was owned by stockholders. They’d managed to buy most of them back, but it’d cost them a hell of a lot more than the initial missing money.
I wasn’t sure how they’d feel finding out that Connie wasn’t involved, if that’s how it turned out, though. That bitterness and anger would be hard to extinguish.
Chapter Four
EVA
Working as a nurse in a place like Northwestern Memorial Hospital was physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing. As I drove back to my house in Addison at the end of each day, I felt drained and ready for a shower. It was my way of destressing and coping with things so I could be a productive professional the next day who consistently brought their A-game with them.
My routine consisted of a shower, then in either order, doing housework, and making dinner. Before I’d met Joshua, making a meal for just one person hadn’t been all that appealing, so I tended to do meal prep on my days off; otherwise, I’d just survive on cereal or toast. Now, though, I got to make proper meals for us on the days he joined me, tonight being a perfect example.
After my shower, I made my way to the kitchen, deciding to forego the housework for one night. For my birthday, my brother had bought me a Crock-Pot that roasted, slow-cooked, pressure-cooked, you name it, and it made things so much easier. Before I’d gone to work, I’d prepared the fixings for Jambalaya—probably with a recipe that would make people from Southern Louisiana freak out, but it tasted so good—and now I was putting it all in the pot so that it was ready for him when he got here.
The only thing I had left to do was to chop up the extra Andouille sausage and make the stock for it, and while I did that, I let my mind wander. I’d had an epiphany on the way home about how to reveal and explain my family’s history to Joshua—photo albums.
When Mom had been sentenced, we’d put all of her belongings into a storage facility that I’d found so we could rent her house out, which was big enough to hold everything. All of her furniture, clothes, knick-knacks, and the rest of her life were in there, including the photo albums she’d been obsessive about when we were kids.
Thinking about it, it was pretty sad. We had all of these photographs showing special occasions, our vacations, and just snapshots of our lives, and they’d all come to an abrupt halt like we were frozen in time. I know we all continued to take photos of our own, but we were no longer the family we’d been in those other photos, and I think that’s why none of us had wanted to hold onto them instead of putting them in there with everything else.
Going to get them to show Joshua was going to be hard, but it might help him see that she was a normal person—a loving mother, who’d made a colossal mistake, but who wasn’t an evil person to her kids. A woman who stole from people and who broke the law was still a criminal, but she was also my mom and the woman who’d been the only parent I’d ever had. I needed him to acknowledge that side of her, too, instead of just the legal side.
I was just stirring the stock to add it to the pot when two arms wrapped around my waist, telling me I’d been so absorbed in my plan that I hadn’t heard him come in. We hadn’t been together long, but we had keys to each other’s places already. Not that we spent much time at his modern apartment in the city, seeing as how we both preferred the relative amount of quietness in Addison, but still. They were almost a symbol of how much trust we had in each other at this point.
Which made me feel even guiltier about what I was withholding from him and made me more desperate to fill him in on the truth.
Burying his head in the side of my neck, he kept his lips against it as he asked, “Hey, baby. How was your day?”
“Busy as always. How about you?”
