Staying On Top (Whitman University) Page 2

  “What?” Audra looked up, blinking to dislodge the glassiness hazing her eyes. She’d never had a boyfriend before—probably because she had four slightly scary older brothers—and this Logan thing was out of control. “Why are you going to the library? No one studies at the library.”

  “I need to, um … do some research in the stacks. Some of the reference materials for this take-home test aren’t online yet.”

  For the first time in weeks, Audra’s distraction didn’t make me want to smack the freckles off her pretty face, because it meant she didn’t question my flimsy excuse. Questions weren’t welcome. Not when it came to my dad, and certainly not when it came to the part-time “job” I worked at his request.

  “Okay. Don’t forget about the meeting tonight. We have to review housing applications.”

  “Got it.” Audra and I had been elected—not that we’d run—to oversee the freshmen and sophomores requesting to move into the Kappa Chi house next semester. We were required to fill the house, and since upperclassmen preferred to live off campus we weren’t above forcing newbies in to fill up the rooms.

  It’s how Audra and I had ended up living here as roommates, but that had worked out fine. Much better than my disastrous freshman year trying to keep Kennedy Gilbert from killing herself. She seemed to be doing well, now, and she and her boyfriend, Toby, were living together in a pretty swanky beachfront place. I was happy for her, but not sorry to be living with someone normal. Or someone who had been normal before she started secret dating.

  I looked down at my outfit. Yoga pants and a Kappa tee were no good—I needed a skirt and blouse at the least, but my suit would be better. No way would Audra fail to notice me changing clothes, so I gathered the suit and a blouse on their hangers, then paused. “I’m going to stop at the cleaners. Do you want me to take anything for you?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Hold on.” She put down her phone and slid off the bed, then dragged four dresses and one skirt out of her closet, tossing them on my bed. “Thanks.”

  That was easy enough, except adding a stop at the cleaner’s to my list.

  None of my sisters interrupted my escape from the house. I passed through the massive white columns and stepped down into the parking lot, enjoying the cooler brush of air against my cheeks. Autumn was my favorite time in New York. This time of year, late October, was perfect. The trees would be changing, the air would taste crisp and smoky, and the sky would be impossibly huge and blue. I missed it, and not just the weather. The people, more than anything.

  Even if I had spent more time ripping them off than getting to know any of them.

  The nice thing about the Kappa house being the farthest sorority from main campus was our secluded lot. No one saw as I changed out of my T-shirt and pants and into a skirt and blouse, complete with an annoying pair of old-lady panty hose I’d snuck into my purse. If my dad’s lessons had taught me anything at all, it was that the proper appearance did at least 85 percent of the work. And old ladies freaking loved panty hose.

  *

  Dad had been asking me for more favors than ever since I relocated to Florida, thanks to the abundance of gullible, rich elderly people. The drive to this particular job didn’t take long. Twenty minutes or so after leaving campus my GPS said I’d arrived, and a street lined with sprawling faux-brick estates welcomed me to the neighborhood.

  Less than three years to go, I thought as I pulled into the driveway and shut off the car, taking a few minutes to clear my head. I’d be done with school, have a degree, and be able to get a real job; I would finally be able to refuse the “work” my dad tossed my direction.

  The ever-present worry that I didn’t know how to live any other way tried to wriggle past my defenses, but I swiped it away. I could figure it out. Just because a duck had never seen water didn’t mean it couldn’t swim. Just because I’d grown up stealing didn’t mean I couldn’t be honest.

  It took the space of a few deep breaths to twist my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck and dig my fake FBI credentials from the glove compartment. I slipped them into my jacket pocket and climbed out of my high-end Toyota, which I drove on purpose so as not to intimidate potential marks. Plus, FBI agents didn’t drive Beamers like the one Dad had sent me to Whitman in.

  The driveway had been recently repoured, and flowering bushes and plants lined the pathway to the massive double front doors. The house was the kind of structure that only rich people in Florida managed to build—more than one story, with an exterior cut to look like brick instead of the stucco that was more appropriate for the environment down here.

  All of these huge, sprawling houses and sprawling lawns felt foreign to me. The extra space felt wasteful after living in Manhattan. Some people hated it—the crush of humanity, the never being alone, the constant noise—but after growing up that way, the opposite felt wrong.

  An impressively long and loud ding-dong sounded when I pressed the bell. I fixed a friendly but professional smile on my lips and a look of appropriate sympathy in my eyes. My father had stolen over ten million dollars from this woman earlier in the week, but she had another fifty squirreled away in accounts to which she’d retained her access. I was here to change that.

  Two years ago the light briefcase would have been slippery in my sweating palm, but today I had no nerves. What had started as an eight-year-old girl playing a game had turned into a job at some point—and into my lifestyle as well as my father’s.

  The door opened, revealing a tidy African-American woman in an old-fashioned black-and-white maid’s uniform. “Afternoon. Can I help you?”

  She gave me a tight smile that said she hated her life, one that relaxed the slight knot at the base of my neck. It meant she had no love for her employer, which worked in my favor.

  I pulled the badge out of my pocket as though I’d been doing it for years. “I’m Special Agent Cooley with the FBI. I’d like to speak with …” I checked a blank notepad on the back of my badge. “Miss Daisy Brown, if she’s available.”

  “Miss Brown is relaxing right now. Can I tell her what this is about?”

  “I’m afraid I need to speak with her directly, but you can tell her I’m with the white-collar crime division.”

  “She ain’t gonna know what that means.”

  “It means we investigate fraud. Like the kind run by questionable accountants who steal money from hardworking ladies such as yourself,” I replied dryly.

  She eyed me for a few more seconds before opening the door wider and inviting me into the foyer. Step one—get into the house.

  “I’ll tell Miss Brown you’re here. It might be a few minutes. Can I get you something to drink?”

  The acid in her tone made me think the beverage would be mostly spit, so I shook my head. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

  The maid left me alone in the foyer. The lack of warmth, or even an invitation to sit, made me wonder why my father had chosen this particular mark and how he’d managed to wrangle the first ten million out of her hands. The house was rattier on the inside than out—the walls had some cracks that needed to be repaired, the wooden floors could use a buff and stain, and the paisley carpet on the stairs was worn thin in the middle. It all added up to the assumption that the mark had money, but she didn’t like to spend it.

  Maybe Dad was getting bored in his old age. Picking bigger challenges. Fine for him, but I wasn’t feeling much like taking on a tough con today. I actually did have an Ethical Theory take-home test to complete before tomorrow.

  It was more than twenty minutes before Miss Daisy Brown made an appearance in the foyer. Silk robes draped her soft, curvy figure from head to toe. She had her hair curled up in a style that made me feel as though I’d stepped through the door onto a 1950s film set, and the fact that she had on so many jewels I worried she’d fall down the stairs only added to the image.

  “Maise, you can go now. I’ll be wanting more fresh cucumbers from the market.” Miss Daisy Brown dismissed her help before turning
to me, the smile on her face as icy cold as the diamonds around her neck.

  The tag on my sensible navy blue suit scratched at my neck and the backs of my knees. The smile on my face felt forced, but she couldn’t tell. I held out a hand when the old lady tottered over to me, her ankles wobbly in the three-inch heels that barely brought her even with my five-foot-eight.

  “Good morning, Miss Brown. I’m Special Agent Gillian Cooley, with the white-collar crime division at the FBI.” She peered at my badge when I held it out. The squint of her eyes told me she needed to be wearing glasses. They probably didn’t complement her fashion statement. “I’m here to discuss your recent fallout with accountant Neil Saunders.”

  Miss Daisy Brown pursed her lips, which were too full, the skin around them too tight. She didn’t mind spending the money on fighting a losing battle against time, it seemed. “I don’t have anything to say about that.”

  Great.

  Step two—assess the mark’s intelligence and level of desperation.

  “If you wouldn’t mind sitting down with me for just a few minutes, I’d like to ask you a few questions and let you know what our task force is doing to recover the funds lost by you and many others.”

  Her ears perked up at the mention of others. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to listen to what you’ve got to say. We can go into the dining room. Maise set out some lemonade.”

  More like saliva juice.

  I followed her through a wide doorway into the ugliest dining room known to man. The walls were covered in black-and-white damask paper and dotted with giant wrought-iron sconces that looked as though they were meant for the outdoors. The table was mahogany and stretched from one end of the room to the other, even though I knew from my research that the woman had no family. She’d never married or had children; she had no one to spend her millions on—not that she’d earned a cent of them. Her grandfather had owned massive amounts of property in Texas that had been flowing with oil. His descendants still lived off the proceeds.

  The entire house smelled of kasha and mothballs, along with a potpourri of other scents I had no inclination to pin down. Trying not to breathe through my nose, I slid into an upholstered chair at the dining-room table and pulled a folder from my briefcase. It contained the details of what was stolen from her investment accounts and a forged report as to my father’s last-known whereabouts, as well as a nifty little card that claimed to give the FBI permission to include her in the list of victims and continue working on her case. In truth, it added my father as a signatory on her checking accounts and safety deposit box at the local bank.

  It was shocking how many financial institutions didn’t call to double-check things like signature cards, or even require customers to fill them out in person.

  She sat down and stirred three packets of Splenda into a tall glass of yellow lemonade. “Maise is trying to kill me. Today it’s forgetting the sugar in the lemonade and not making it pink like I asked. Tomorrow it’ll be swapping arsenic for lemons.”

  I kept my mouth shut about that, but made no move to grab the sweating glass in front of me. “Miss Brown, this will only take a few minutes. I’m here so we can verify the facts of your particular case. If you would like to be included in our investigation, I’ll just need a signature.”

  She took the stapled pieces of paper containing her case specifics and glanced over them. The breath staling in my lungs released when her hawklike eyes slid over the words and numbers instead of studying them. There weren’t any mistakes—I knew the scam backward and forward—but I always worried there would be too much information there, or things the FBI wouldn’t know, but Neil Saunders, a.k.a. Neil Paddington, would.

  She didn’t say anything about my having too much information, or start screaming her fool head off for the police. Miss Daisy Brown did pinch her bottom lip, watching me in silence while the rusty wheels turned in her batty old brain.

  “What are you gonna do to him? If you find him I mean, which is doubtful since the federal government spends more time with its head up its ass than finding criminals, even petty ones like Neil Saunders.”

  The mini-tirade ended as quickly as it began, leaving me a little dazed but excited about the prospect of getting her on the topic of revenge and off the path of scrutinizing me. “We’re going to set up a sting with the information you and others authorize us to use, lure him out into the open, and arrest him. It’s not going to be easy to find him, but these people always make a mistake. And we’re there when they do.”

  She snorted, then downed the rest of her lemonade and wiped her chin. “You’re not ever gonna get my ten million bucks back, but let me tell you something—there’s more where that came from, and more where that came from, too. The Texas Browns got so much money the likes of my crook accountant and Uncle Sam won’t never guess.”

  Apparently not enough money to buy this broad some class. Or grammar lessons. Instead of engaging with her, I behaved like any good federal employee and ignored her idiotic commentary. It only made her keep blabbering in an attempt to get under my skin, but the tirade ended up in my favor, with signed authorizations for three different banks.

  I said my good-byes to Miss Daisy Brown, who waved me away like a gnat trying to kill itself in her lemonade. The little envelopes containing her signature cards, all addressed in my best imitation of her handwriting and bearing her return address, fell out of sight into a mailbox on campus. Dad would have access to three more of her accounts within the week. I wondered if he’d be interested in the likelihood that the woman had millions more buried in her backyard. Possibly in a creepy cat graveyard that may or may not contain the last few men who’d tried to woo her money away.

  It seemed unlikely we would get it all, but that was okay. She had some to spare.

  Dad had promised me ten million dollars for the last eleven years of free assistance on his cons—I’d been doing more legwork than he had ever since he’d decided living in the States proved too much of a risk. The thought of walking away had entered my mind, for sure, but somewhere along the way this had become what I did. I deserved the money in return for everything I’d surrendered, childhood included, and it was almost over.

  Less than three years. Then I would be out of the game, and life could be whatever I wanted.

  Chapter 3

  Sam

  We had not gotten in touch with my accountant, which boded poorly for his being able to help us recover my money, and the distraction had done nothing good for my game. I’d made it into the second week of the tournament in Switzerland by the skin of my teeth, helped along by an injury and a seriously uncharacteristic day of poor play by the top Spaniard. Tomas was a good friend of mine, which was one reason I knew to go after his hamstring.

  Tennis was funny that way—practice and party with a guy one day, use every dirty trick in the book to kick his ass on the court the next. Every win meant more prize money, and since it appeared I was thirty million poorer, that had become more important than ever.

  The season ended in less than a month—my plane would land in Paris in an hour, and after a week in one of my favorite European cities, all that remained was the Davis Cup and ATP finals. Leo wanted me to focus, to concentrate on the tennis and let him sort out my newfound financial woes. Easier said than done. Even spending the last couple of nights in Basel with Chloe hadn’t made me feel better, and that was a damn shame.

  My hookups had waned over the past six months. I had spent about seven weeks dating an up-and-coming Aussie girl, and since she’d gotten tired of my “shallowness,” there had only been a smattering of one-night stands to take her place. My interest level had been too low to argue with her during the, in my opinion, overly dramatic breakup scene, but I wasn’t shallow. It had just been clear to me that the two of us weren’t made for any kind of long-term compatibility.

  It had surprised me how much I’d like to find something less shallow. Just a little over a year ago I’d met Quinn’s girlfriend, Emilie, and I
’d kind of thought he was crazy for sticking to one girl, no matter how totally hot.

  The idea that I might want to change had started in St. Moritz, when I’d met their friend Blair. She’d made it clear she had no interest in sleeping with me, exclusively or not, but there had been something between us. A spark. I was sure she felt it, too, but I didn’t know her well enough to guess at her reasons for not wanting to act on it. Even though it hadn’t worked out, the experience had flipped some kind of switch in me.

  I’d spent my life embracing cynicism regarding long-term relationships. I thought that feelings couldn’t change, that there were families who wanted what was best for one another always, no matter what. It was what felt true to me. It was what I knew.

  For a girl like Blair, for a feeling like that … for a moment I thought about trying.

  The wheels touched down in Paris, bouncing a little and forcing me to brace my hands on my armrests. I went through the motions in customs, which never got easier no matter how many stamps were in my passport. It would be impossible for me to answer a question about the last time I’d been in the States for anything other than business, but that didn’t stop customs officials giving me a hard time.

  When the front desk clerk pulled me aside at the Parisian hotel’s elevator bank, I thought, No way is this happening again. Leo and the rest of my team had arrived earlier today and he’d texted to say everything was ready and waiting—including a suite with a massage table all set up.

  “Perdon, Monsieur Bradford?”

  “Oui?” I felt so tired. My six-week break couldn’t come soon enough. If we weren’t poised to win the David Cup, I’d be more than a little tempted to end my season after this tournament.

  “I have a message for you.” He held out a piece of folded cardstock.