Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (40 page)

It was actually a U.S. Coast Guard vessel
that flagged them down: they hadn’t even gotten out of American
waters. I can imagine it: “Prepare to be boarded.” Here everything
gets a little hazy, but you can imagine these two — this particular
two — high on adrenaline and feeling
this
close to pulling
off the biggest score — the master score — of their lives. And
everything is in place. Everything has been going like clockwork,
just as planned. And then, in a heartbeat, the jig is up. Ernie, of
course, was supposed to be dead. But Paul, as far as the two of
them knew, wasn’t wanted by anyone: there was nothing that they
knew about to connect them to each other. Whatever their thinking
was, Ernie hit the water: or was pushed. It was night, they would
have figured that he could float around in his lifejacket or cling
to the dark side of the boat until the heat had cleared off. Or
maybe Paul got suddenly tired of playing second string to a showy
hitter.

What neither of them could have anticipated
was me. If, as they’d supposed, Arianna had seen the “killing” at
camp Arrowheart as they’d intended, she would have just reported
that the guy doing the shooting was a man of medium height and
medium build, average enough looking to be unfindable outside of a
police lineup. Possibly, not even then. But since Arianna and I had
gone to the police and given them everything we had, the
authorities knew they were looking for Paul, as well. And they also
figured that, when they found Paul, Ernie wouldn’t be far away.

So the Coast Guard secured the boat, right
there in the water. I can just imagine the scene: Paul, a picture
of innocence and thinking no one even knew his name, forking over
identification. The Coast Guard running his ID and finding Paul was
anything but the vacationing executive he was pretending to be.

They took Paul into custody. And then they
searched the boat. No doubt looking for Ernie, but they found other
stuff of interest, including Paul’s laptop so jam-packed full of
evidence, he would no doubt have thrown it overboard with Ernie if
he had even the slightest inkling that their encounter with the
Coast Guard would be anything other than a routine check.

Among other incriminating bits of computer
evidence, when the electronic investigators got their hands on that
laptop, they found passwords and logon information for no less than
ten different trading accounts under as many different names and
none of them traceable to either Paul or Ernie. They also found
e-mail from Marcus Hayles, now deceased. It was an ambiguous note,
slightly encoded, but it seemed to be asking for more money for
services not specified. Another couple of pegs fell into place.

When the Coast Guard apprehended Paul, he
didn’t mention his partner in the water. He probably would have
been hoping that, somehow, Ernie would manage to slip away. Even
with one of them in jail, if the other was free, there would be a
chance to complete the trades and cash in on their Langton scam.
And, even if the accounts got blocked, Ernie had access to the kind
of money that can buy a lot of happiness when it comes to lawyers
and just generally smoothing out legal stuff.

The Coast Guard towed the boat back into
port, secured the vessel and handed Paul over to the police. Still
nothing about Ernie and, in fact, the earliest news reports didn’t
mention him either.

Arianna had a couple of bad days around
Ernie’s disappearance. She was completely freaked he’d show up at
their house in the middle of the night and, from her perspective,
he wasn’t her husband anymore. In her mind, he’d turned into some
kind of monster. I couldn’t blame her.

She could have stayed at a hotel, but it
just seemed right to invite her to stay at my place. I seriously
don’t have room for houseguests, but we borrowed a futon from Tyler
and turned it into a three-day slumber party. I think it was
healing for both of us. Not that surprisingly and with everything
considered, we discovered that we had a lot in common. Secret
sisters, in a sense, both having survived a close encounter with,
as Alex Montoya would have said, a corporate psychopath.

A vacationing family in a charter boat
fished Ernie out of the water three days later, still floating in
his lifejacket. The coroner’s report said he didn’t drown, but had
been killed by a “sharp blow to his skull” as would happen, for
instance, if you were floating around in the water at night very
carefully, very stealthily, and a Coast Guard vessel — or maybe
even your own boat — suddenly moved quickly, or you were lifted
against another boat’s wake, hit with a blunt object and jettisoned
overboard or... well, we’ll never really know and speculation is
pointless. Ernie was dead. I mean, this time he was
really
dead. They didn’t even dick around with visual identification this
time, but went straight to DNA testing.

Arianna said she felt oddly empty, but that
it was time for her to head back to Brentwood and figure out how to
fill up the rest of her life. I couldn’t blame her: there was a
sudden and unexpected hole where her husband was supposed to be
even though, truly, that had happened long before he got himself
dead.

Aside from the things that I had told the
sheriff in San Bernardino — and how relevant was any of that, when
you thought about it? — there was nothing to suggest Ernie had been
involved in the whole kidnap/shortsell/murder scenario in any way
except as a victim. The FedEx pack Sarah sent me burns with its own
weight in the file drawer in my desk. The material Jackson
accumulated would be a damning cap on everything; would cast its
own kind of shadow. I think about it sometimes, about what it would
mean, how it would change things. But ruining a dead man’s
reputation would do nothing but hurt his widow and maybe even make
things easier on Paul. I don’t want any part of either of those
things.

Of course, as soon as he heard they’d found
Ernie’s body, Paul tried to pin everything on Ernie — who, as a
dead person, couldn’t defend himself — but there was simply no
corroboration from anywhere: the two of them had done that good a
job covering their tracks.

The newspapers have been enjoying that
aspect of the story, as well. All of a sudden, Ernie is the
deceased hero CEO who “lost his life attempting to escape from his
captor, a man who had been jealous of Billings since they were
together at Harvard.”

And, no: I didn’t almost lose my lunch when
I read that. Because it doesn’t really matter anymore. In some
regards, it’s better this way. For one thing, Wall Street just
doesn’t need another insider scandal: this one would be even
juicier than the guy who used bail-out money to buy an eight
thousand dollar toilet paper roll holder. Also, since the trading
damage — all that manipulative short selling — had come from
outside
of the company, Langton’s damage control is somewhat
easier than it would have been if Ernie’s involvement had come to
light. And, since that will ultimately result in the stock price
recovering more quickly, I’m all for that. And I know my mom would
certainly feel the same way.

It would all have been different if Ernie
had lived. I would have happily done everything I could to bury him
then. But he’s dead and, like I said before, dead is dead. He’s
already buried.

I would have thought that, with all that’s
happened, I would have been glad that Ernie was gone. Relieved.
And, I won’t lie, part of me
is
relieved: he got very scary,
there at the end. But another part of me is surprisingly sad. Maybe
not so sad for the Ernie he became, but perhaps the one he
could
have been had he taken different roads, made other
choices. It’s hard not to grieve a little bit for that Ernie.

That Wednesday when we knew Ernie was dead
and Arianna went home, I called Steve and he drove up to Malibu. He
brought a pizza and I opened a bottle of wine and we sat out on the
deck together and I finally told him everything —
everything
— while the sun set over the Pacific. It felt good — cleansing — to
be able to spill it all at his feet in a big messy heap. I realized
I was crying about the same time as I realized he was cupping the
back of my head in one hand, very gently. A reassuring gesture and,
somehow, an intimate one. And I hadn’t even known I wanted to —
needed to — cry.

We were still sitting there like that when
Jennifer, Tyler and Tasya came back from some family outing. We
heard them, before we saw them, shared laughter announcing their
arrival like some joyous wave. My tears were gone by then and they
smiled when they saw us. I caught Jennifer’s approving look as I
introduced them all to Steve.

Jennifer looks so healthy now, though it’s
only been a short time. It seems to me she glows with some internal
light that wasn’t there before. Finding love can do that. It
doesn’t matter that the love she’s found was there for her all
along. That kind of love doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know
how to access it. It’s like having a key but not knowing what door
it opens.

She’s seeing a psychologist, getting regular
Reikki treatments and Tasya said she’d signed her up for some kind
of aromatherapy empowerment workshop. Being the kind of skeptic I
am, I guess I figure the real power in all of that is discovering
how loved and cared about she is. These crazy film people that
she’s forced to call her family — as self-involved as they can be —
will go to any lengths, no matter how whacko, to help her put
herself back together again. Don’t kid yourself, there’s power in
that.

Just as importantly, I think, Jennifer has
found some things inside herself that she thought she’d lost and
some others she never knew she had. She’s reconnected with her
father and has discovered that Tasya is an ally and a friend, not
the enemy and rival she had feared.

After the doctor had examined Jennifer and
announced that all she needed was to sleep it off, Tyler went
raging down to The Curl to have a talk with Corby. Tasya said Tyler
came back deflated and looking ten years older. Corby had told him
he had nothing to do with any of it. He said he didn’t even know
anything about a kidnapping; just that Jennifer was having trouble
at home. “He told me,” Tyler said, his voice quiet but edged with
pain, “that Jennifer had said that her father didn’t care what
happened to her. What did I do to make her feel that way?”

I told Tyler that, at some level, it doesn’t
really matter. The paths we take to get places can be even or
convoluted but, in the end, it makes no difference. As long as we
get where we’re intended to go. And Tasya has put her foot down:
Jennifer has to work very hard now to make up for the schooling
she’d lost but, provided she finishes the year with adequate marks
at a new school, Tasya has insisted Tyler help Jennifer with her
goal to become an actress. Her first year of study will be in LA
and, provided that all goes according to plan, she can go to New
York the following year. Tasya confided in me that this will give
them another whole year with Jennifer, to make sure she’s stable
and strong and ready for such a big step. But, from Jennifer’s
perspective, she’ll get the chance to make her dreams come true.
And Tyler and Tasya will watch her do it, from very close by.

The night of the wine and pizza, Steve
didn’t share my bed. To be honest, after he left, I was somewhat
disappointed that he didn’t even try. Later, in Ensenada where the
bed has become a place where we spend a lot of time, he told me it
wasn’t that he didn’t think about it that night.

“I thought about it a lot, in fact. But I
would have felt like such a shit that night, Madeline, taking
advantage of the vulnerable girl in my arms.” And then he smiled,
“And, anyway, I knew there’d be ample opportunity if I bided my
time.”

I’m not in love with Steve. I
love
him — who wouldn’t love a guy who painted their toenails? — but I
can’t imagine sharing my life with him. With anyone, for that
matter. Not just now. But right this minute, with the prospect of
another moonlit evening on the terrace, another walk in the surf,
another chat over breakfast, I can’t think of any place I’d rather
be. For the moment, that’s enough.

###

Dear Reader,

I hope you enjoyed
Mad Money.
Look
for the next two Madeline Carter novels —
The Next Ex
and
Calculated Loss
— to be available in e-book format over the
next few months. If you’d like to be notified about future
publications, please visit me on the Web at
http://lindalrichards.com and scroll down to be added to my e-mail
list. Thanks again for spending time in Madeline’s world. And
mine!

Fondly,

Linda

More Madeline Carter is Coming Soon in
e-book format from Linda L. Richards…

In
The Next Ex
, former
stockbroker-turned-day trader Madeline Carter agrees to teach the
indulged wife of an A-list movie producer about the stock market.
When said wife turns up dead, Madeline finds herself in the middle
of a series of murders while inadvertently opening up a 40-year old
cold case.

High finance and haute cuisine equal a
recipe for murder in
Calculated Loss
. Day trader Madeline
Carter hightails it to Vancouver when she learns her ex-husband,
television chef Braydon Gauthier, has killed himself. What she
finds there ends up being so much worse than she ever
suspected.

Cover photography and design by David
Middleton

http://www.DavidMiddletonCreative.com

A
uthor’s Note

Nothing in my life has
ever gone as smoothly as the birth of Madeline Carter. Every aspect
of bringing her to Earth went with the sort of clocklike precision
generally only found in fiction. It seems that Madeline — like brie
and marzipan and ice wine — was simply meant to be. Sometimes I’m
not even sure I had a lot to do with it. One day, Madeline
simply
was.