Total pages in book: 29
Estimated words: 26659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 107(@250wpm)___ 89(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 26659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 107(@250wpm)___ 89(@300wpm)
The problem was when we’d reviewed the police footage of their interviews with Connie and when it’d been brought up in court, she genuinely hadn’t even known about it, but they’d still decided it was a cut and dry case.
That was so far from the truth, though. The IP address that’d hacked the account had also been cleverly masked. Given that she struggled even to operate the flip phone she’d had at the time when it’d started ringing during the interview, I just couldn’t see her being able to pull that off.
So, while I was trying to find the money for Harry’s uncle, I was also trying to find out the truth for Eva. If her mom had been bribed, blackmailed, or set up, I’d happily take on that battle for her.
Harry had been my best friend since I was five, the guy who’d had my back when my parents had turned theirs on me when I was twenty and had quit college. He’d helped me find the capital to open up Shingle, helped me file all the paperwork that the city needed for it, and found suppliers who wouldn’t try to fuck me over. In short, he’d been my rock.
But now, Eva reminded me of the guy I’d been back then. Sure, she had her job and her brother and sisters, but who had her back, helping her find the answers to her problems? And these all had to be weighing on her like a ten-ton weight.
She answered something inside me I hadn’t known had been calling out, she completed me, and I couldn’t turn those feelings off. Not even for my best friend.
I was halfway back to my office when the door was yanked open, and Harry appeared with a tight smile on his face.
“Looks like we might have found Roy.”
A spark flared in my stomach. “Where?”
“Seems he lives with his family in Gary, Indiana.”
From where we were right now, that put him at just over an hour away. Connie had raised the family in an area of Illinois called Aurora, which would mean he’d been roughly two hours’ drive away from them at the time. That was almost smart, but how had he managed to hide all this time?
Moving around him to put the coffees on my desk, I carefully weighed what I was about to say. It might not all be adding up for me, but I still didn’t want to piss off my friend of twenty-five years.
“I thought you’d looked everywhere for him? How did you miss him being that close?”
“His name’s not Roy Green, that’s why. It’s Tyson Randall.”
“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.