Sky High (Three Contemporary Novella's) (21 page)

Garrett snorted. “I bet.”

She reached for her glass again but found it empty. So she reached for Garrett’s. His hand closed over hers.

“Slow down. That won’t fix it. Trust me, I’ve tried. Meg, you have to talk to the authorities. You know that, right?”

She nodded. “I just don’t know what to do.”

“I have a contact at the Bureau. Let me talk to him. You can’t go home yet anyway. You said he has your passport, right?”

She nodded. “Along with everything else I own in the back of that shitty car.”

Garrett chuckled. “It’s Sunday. You can’t talk to the embassy about your passport until tomorrow at the earliest. So why don’t you take a shower and I’ll call my friend at the Bureau?”

“I can’t take advantage of you like this, Garrett. I’ll go get a hotel room or something.”

“It’s okay. Besides, I’m working on a story about this guy, remember? Thanks to you, I just landed right in the middle of it.”

She looked back at Garrett’s file on Spencer—Mark Rubiak. Of course. He was a reporter and this was just a story. That’s why he was taking care of her. She needed to remember that. It was time for her to stop building fairy tales around guys she didn’t really know and face reality. So Garrett was using her. That was okay, as long as she didn’t forget it. She wouldn’t. Meg’s days of blind trust were over.

The scalding hot shower did wonders to revive her, washing away a day of travel grime and a night of misery. Wallowing wasn’t in her nature, so when she climbed out of the shower and wrapped a towel around herself, she felt, if not
okay
, at least refreshed and ready to face the world again. That is, until she heard the voices out in Garrett’s living room. Damn, the FBI moved fast. She couldn’t bear the thought of sliding her dirty clothes from yesterday back on, so she resigned herself to facing the FBI agents in the oversized bathrobe hanging on the bathroom door.

Garrett was sitting at the table with two men, one about his age and one older, maybe in his fifties. Garrett looked up when she appeared in the doorway. His eyes flickered over her for just an instant, from her wet hair to her bare feet. Her face flushed just from that split-second perusal. Looking away, she dragged the mass of her hair over her shoulder and busied herself with arranging it into a loose braid.

Garrett cleared his throat and all three men stood up.

“Meg, this is Agent David McManus and Agent Ken Durkin from the FBI. This is Meg… Jesus, I don’t even know your last name.”

She laughed in spite of the seriousness of the situation. “Holloway.”

“Meg Holloway… Wait, your dad was Holloway, too?”

She nodded in confusion. “Why?”

“Your dad was Peter Holloway, who owned Holloway Industries.”

“It went public ten years ago and he gave up his seat on the board of directors when he got sick, but yeah, why?”

Garrett sighed and raked a hand through his hair before looking at David McManus. “I suspect we can add cyberstalking to the list.”

“Wait… Are you saying he was after me from the start?”

“I’m saying I doubt it was a coincidence that he showed up in that particular chat room, talking to you specifically.”

She was still turning that over in her mind when Ken Durkin, the older man, motioned to a chair. “Miss Holloway, please sit down.” He wasn’t overly tall, but he was a large guy, broad-shouldered, with a thick neck and blond hair in a buzz cut. He exuded a kind of quiet brute strength, and she never wanted to find herself on the receiving end of it. David McManus was taller and thinner, with short, dark hair and a serious, intense face. He seemed to be the lead on the case, since there was a fat file of information on the table in front of him. Ken seemed to be the one Garrett already knew. Of course he’d have friends who looked like they could make you disappear where they’d never find the body.

David leaned forward and placed a small tape recorder on the table between them. “Ordinarily we’d bring you into the office for this, but on the off chance that Rubiak is out there keeping tabs on you, he shouldn’t see you at FBI headquarters. Do you mind if I record this conversation?”

She shook her head. This was all so surreal. FBI agents and tape-recorded testimony and Mark Rubiak cyberstalking her from the start and possibly
following
her. What she was feeling must have shown on her face, because just then Garrett scooted back from the table. “I’ll get you some coffee.” She nodded numbly, and then when he passed behind her chair, she felt his hand lightly brush her shoulder. It was only a tiny touch, but just what she needed to feel less alone. David McManus pressed record and Meg began telling them everything she knew about Spencer Fairchild, also known as Mark Rubiak, also known as the Sheep of Wall Street.

It was many hours later. Her voice was hoarse from all the talking. Papers were strewn everywhere and David McManus had changed the cassette in his recorder three times and nearly used up his yellow legal pad making notes. Garrett had gone out to get them lunch at one point and now empty Styrofoam containers littered one end of the long table.

Meg felt exhausted, wrung dry from relating it all, but oddly freed as well. As humiliating as it was to examine how she’d been scammed, saying it out loud, turning it over to David and Ken, had the effect of taking her connection to the events and squashing it flat. She was no longer in that relationship. Now her job was to begin getting over it, and Spencer—Mark—was someone else’s problem to deal with. Maybe it felt that way because there were so many people ready and willing to make him pay, so she didn’t have to.

“So he never told you where he lived during your online conversations?” David asked.

She shook her head. “He said he had a big condo in an upscale part of town, but I’m sure if I’d made it that far yesterday, that would have turned out to be a lie, too. God, I feel so stupid.”

David paused in his note-taking and looked up at her. “Meg, do you know why we call him the Sheep of Wall Street? Because he’s a sociopath who fools everyone he meets and has done so for his entire career. This plan of his took
years
to put in place. Years when he met with investors and lied to their faces while he plotted to steal their retirement savings. Years of lying to every single one of his colleagues. Even with the mountain of evidence we have against him, there are people he worked with who simply can’t believe he did it because he seemed like such a nice guy, so harmless. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Trust me, the guy’s a master manipulator. You weren’t the only one he fooled.”

“Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. So what now?”

David sat back and exchanged a look with Ken. “We’ve been chasing this guy for a year and this is the closest we’ve gotten to him, but we still don’t know where he is. Mexico City is huge. He could stay hidden here for his whole life. We’re hoping you’ll work with us to help bring him in.”

“Me?”

“You’ve already got an established relationship with him and a way to contact him.”

She held up her hands. “I threw a drink in his face yesterday. I’m pretty sure we’re done. He doesn’t want to hear from me.”

“No, but he’s desperate to hear from your money.”

Then Garrett spoke up. “And the fact that the money comes in a package with you will be a tremendous incentive. Trust me.”

She looked up and their eyes met. She’d been sitting in a bathrobe talking to two FBI agents for hours and she hadn’t felt as exposed as she did the moment Garrett’s eyes dipped down to the low V of her robe and back up.

Clearing her throat, she refocused on David. “So what do you want me to do? Email him?”

“Tell him you’ve had a change of heart. You want to give it another chance.”

“That won’t be an easy sell after yesterday.”

“Meg,” David implored. “You’ve been talking to the guy for four months. He learned you so he could play you. But you were learning him, too. Right now, you’re our number one expert on how Mark Rubiak thinks.”

She sat back and thought about that, all those emails and chats, months of sharing and planning. Did she know what to say to Spencer to make him want to see her again? Something sparked in her chest, something hot and a little bit malicious. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but it felt good. It felt the way Garrett’s scotch tasted, warming her up from the inside out. She let it grow and spread. Yes, she knew exactly what to say to Spencer. He’d used her own weakness and need against her? Well, that street went two ways.

Garrett, David, and Ken all clustered around her chair as she opened her laptop and logged in to her email. She typed his name into the address box.

“Hey, can’t you just track his IP address or whatever?”

David gave her a bored glance. “The guy expertly shifted millions of dollars around the world through elaborate phony electronic financial structures. Trust me, he’s not using the IP address of his local internet cafe.”

“Oh. Right. So what do I say?”

“What would make him reconsider?”

She thought about it, hands poised over the keyboard. Banishing all thoughts of Mark, the creepy predator she met yesterday, she summoned up Spencer, kind and handsome. She forced herself to remember everything Spencer made her feel, even if those feelings were already starting to seem secondhand, like they belonged to some other version of herself. When she was back in the mind-set of the girl she’d been two days ago, she started typing.

Dear Spencer,

I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. The situation threw me. It was a lot to take in all at once. But I’ve been up all night reading our old emails, and Spencer, we have something real, don’t we? You feel it, too? This connection is bigger than what we look like or what our lives are like or how much money we have. You know me, and I still feel like I know you. The you inside. So I’d like another chance to get to know the rest of you. We had something good before. I think we still might. I’m still here in Mexico City, staying at a hotel. Let’s get a drink and start over.

Love, Meg

“What now?” she asked as she hit send and sat back.

“We wait for his answer,” David said. He gave her their numbers with instructions to call day or night, then they left to go back to their office and debrief the Sheep of Wall Street team. Mark had a
team
of FBI agents on his case.

Garrett poured her another scotch as soon as they were gone. “So what do you want to do now?”

Meg looked around the room and then down at herself, still wearing the bathrobe she’d put on that morning. “I want to go shopping.”

#

Garrett took her to the upscale shops along Avenida Presidente Masaryk in Polanco because it was the only place he knew. It turned out to be the right call. For such an unassuming girl, Meg asserted her heiress bona fides by racking up some impressive credit card action in a record short time. At her first stop, after she paid, she changed into new clothes in the ladies’ room, slipping into a little black dress that was astoundingly sexy for being so simple. Perhaps it was that Meg was so uncalculating about it. When she emerged, tugging her skirt into place, she didn’t even spare a glance to see how he reacted to the dress. If she had, she’d have seen the way his eyes glazed over, the way his lips parted in speechless lust, the way he had to subtly shift positions to hide the evidence of what she did to him. But she didn’t notice any of that. She merely retrieved her shopping bag from him with a sunny smile and headed off to the next store.

This was ridiculous and way too domestic. He probably could have left her to finish up alone. He could go find some nice, cool bar and drink the afternoon away. But what David said about the possibility of Rubiak tracking her, however remote, made him paranoid. So here he was, minding her like a border collie, holding her stuff, and following her to the next store.

He’d successfully zoned out of the whole ordeal until he glanced up in the middle of the Prada boutique and spotted Serena, of all people, making her way toward him. He’d figured he’d run into her at some point while he was in Mexico. They tended to cover the same stories, and the ambassador’s trial was a big one. But encountering her in the reporters’ pen at the courthouse was a lot different than encountering her in the Prada store, holding Meg’s shopping bags while she tried things on.

“Well, well, fancy meeting you here,” she purred, coming to a stop in front of him. She looked pretty good, tall and model-thin with a long sweep of dark brown hair she’d always been really vain about. Her face, with its high, sharp cheekbones and clear blue eyes, was still lovely, but he thought he detected just a little bit of age creeping in around her eyes. Even a cold-blooded bitch like her couldn’t make her scorched-earth way through the world without it showing on her face eventually.

“Serena,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “You’re looking well. In town covering the ambassador’s trial?”

“Of course. It’s the big story right now.”

Garrett suppressed a smirk. “Sure is.”

“What brings you to this part of town?” Serena asked, arching one finely sculpted eyebrow. “It’s a long way from those seedy bars you tend to favor.”

Garrett was scratching the back of his neck, searching for a plausible reason he’d be shopping on Masaryk, when he glanced over Serena’s shoulder and realized the situation had just gotten much more complicated. Meg had paid and was making her way toward them, her eyes fixed curiously on Serena. Fuck. He’d have to make some brief introductions and scoot Meg out as quickly as possible. Serena noted his gaze wasn’t on her and followed it to Meg.