Page 13 of Behind These Four Walls
“I cross-checked the witnesses too. The woman who had the affair with Leonard, Stephanie? Ghost. As in she no longer exists. At least, not her name, Social, address, phone number, or anything else she gave me. The company ID we found for her was a fake name for a temp employee who was interestingly hired in those same two weeks the fake account was established. She was there just long enough to strike an interest in poor Leonard, get him hemmed up in her love so they could hold it over him.”
Isla said, “So that he’d be the fall guy if the embezzling was ever found out.” She was boiling. The unease and guilt she’d once felt? Gone. She was pissed now. This was supposed to be child’s play to a person like Rey. He found the tech stuff. She planned and set the scenes. She was the POC with Michelle and their other clients. Nat was the decoy or the prop, with Isla as backup. Rey’s tech support was never problematic. It had always been ironclad and never failed them. Until now.
Rey shook his head regretfully. Then he tried to appeal to the both of them. “But this was really convincing, high-level stuff. Like I said, if we’d had more time to vet and vet again ... you know we like to rinse and repeat before we give the info up. If we’d had more time.”
“More time?” Isla seethed. “A man is dead, Rey. A family is ruined because of ‘more time.’ That can’t be our excuse.”
Rey shrugged. “It’s all I got. But all my preliminary checks were solid. Nat met with the fake temp receptionist, and she was convincing, right?” He was half standing, leaning over his screens, imploring Nat for a save.
Nat nodded vigorously, twisting her long tendrils of hair in her hand. “If she was acting, she could teach me a few things. I can admit when I’ve been outperformed.” She almost looked like she was impressed by the fake temp receptionist.
The room was getting too hot, and Isla slipped out of the light jacket she’d been wearing. She stood up and paced the floor while Rey and Nat continued discussing how majorly fucked up this was. Isla stopped moving, and their conversation stopped as well. They waited for her to speak.
Isla asked, “What do you think, Nat? You’re the storyteller here.”
“I just perform stories. I don’t make them,” Nat corrected. “But I think he was given the choice of which was the greater evil to him.”
“But he wasn’t embezzling,” Rey said. “What was the blackmail?”
Isla picked up the thread Nat had begun to unravel. “The greater evil, Rey, is whether he wanted his wife to learn he was unfaithful or for her to think he stole money. He could always say he’d tried to steal the money for their family. He couldn’t explain screwing around while she was having his baby. So he agreed to take the heat for the embezzling. But the damage was done.”
Rey finally got it. “He realized Stephanie was a honey trap. He was going to be named as the embezzler anyway. He’d betrayed his wife. He couldn’t face it. In his mind, there was only one way out for him.”
Chapter Ten
“A man is dead.” Heat built behind Isla’s eyes. She put a fist to them to cool them and calm herself. “Please tell me it wasn’t murder.” That would be too much to handle.
“I got into the LAPD’s system. The autopsy is still being done, and that will take a while, but it is definitely suicide. They said he rigged the shotgun in the car to go off using his—”
“Spare us the details.” Nat looked green and tried to center herself. “I don’t think whoever did this expected him to do that. I think they assumed he would go away quietly. They may have even offered him money.”
“Then he should have taken it and gone off into the sunset to be forgotten tomorrow when the next scandal hits. This is LA. Where embezzlers and cheats are aplenty,” Rey wisecracked.
Isla didn’t buy it. “Not to some small-time accountant from the Midwest whose job was his identity and his pride, especially working for the Corrigan Group. He was humiliated. Probably thought he could never look his wife in her face again.”
Nat slouched back against the pillows of the couch, her usually animated, glowing face pale and drawn. “So we set up an innocent man?”
“Looks that way,” Rey said grimly.
Isla wasn’t going to claim that. “No. No,wedidn’t set up anyone.Wewere duped just like he was.”
Rey clicked back to the photo of Leonard, smiling, fresh faced, excited. No more. Isla went to the fridge and got herself a water. Then one for Nat when she indicated she needed one too. Rey opted for the bottle of tequila he pulled from under his desk. He sank back into his tailor-made ergonomic swivel chair built for endless hours of sitting. His frustration was clear. He looked defeated, perplexed, and a little bit angry. The same as Isla felt, only hers was more.
Isla said, “He was an innocent.”
Her words hung heavily in the air. She looked at Matthew Leonard on the big screen, his face looming so that it seemed to fill the whole room. He was smiling in this picture, yes, but she began to imagine his eyes staring at her accusingly. She’d delivered the information they had used to destroy him. She was the sword someone had used to cut him down to hide themselves.
Nat rubbed her temples. “What do we do now? Go back to Crabtree and Elliott and demand an explanation? Cut ties with them?”
“Demand an explanation about the information thatweprovided tothem?” Rey scoffed. Nat shifted so her back was half to him, clearly embarrassed by her suggestion. Isla shot him a warning glance. Now was not the time to get weird with one another.
“My bad, Nat,” he apologized. “We can’t go to the firm because it was our intel, even if it was a rush job. I’m nearly positive that they didn’t know a frame-up was happening. They were used like we were, and we don’t want the Corrigans coming after us.”
“But someone out there is definitely behind this,” Nat said. “Someone inside that corporation.”
“They’re in the wind now. No one’s going to look any further now that the main ‘culprit’ is dead,” Rey admitted, finally turning the screen off.
Leonard’s photo was gone, but his image was seared into Isla’s mind. She hated being used. She hated making mistakes. What ate at her the most was that Leonard was dead and her team had been an unknowing accomplice to the act that they couldn’t speak out against.