Page 38 of Toy

“Remember our conversation two days ago?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

Jolie had been missing for three and a half days now. I’d barely eaten or slept a wink in that time, so all my previous conversations with Beck had turned hazy and distorted in my mind until they were nothing but jumbles of meaningless chatter.

During this period, I’d been struck by the strangest paradoxical sensation. The hours ticked by excruciatingly slowly, because Jolie was away from me and every second without her was torture. Somehow, on the other hand, time seemed to be simultaneously speeding up. The days had blurred together and seemingly rushed by, as if my mind was torturing me by letting me know that Jolie was being taken farther and farther away with every second that passed while I remained helpless and ignorant of her location.

It didn’t make any sense, but right now, nothing really did.

“I asked you to tell me exactly how you got the cult to accept you as a member when you were trying to infiltrate them,” Beck reminded me.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“You said you’d dug into Chastain’s financials a bit, and you noticed he’d lost a fair amount of money in the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. You used that information to weasel your way in by pretending you wanted to buy some land from him.”

“That’s right.”

She pulled out another file. “The good thing about having me on your side is that I can look into things in way more detail, because I have more connections.”

“No shit. You’re a detective.”

She smiled. “Anyway, on the surface, it looks like he did lose a lot of money back then. But I noticed a few tiny discrepancies. Dug deeper. I discovered that he actually didn’t lose anything. He probably just wanted money from you because he’s a greedy old bastard.”

My brows shot up again. “Wait, what?”

“Long story short, one of my connections is a forensic accountant. He owes me a favor, so I made him help out.” She leaned forward. “If you really get into Chastain’s financials, you can see that he started funneling money out of the States into a Costa Rican account as early as 1997. From his personal accounts and his companies.”

“So he was building the backup place at the same time he was building New Eden here in Louisiana.”

“Yup, I’d say so. Always gotta have a backup, right?” She rolled her eyes.

I snorted. “Right.”

“Anyway, he obviously didn’t want to attract too much attention with all the money-moving, because having the IRS or SEC sniffing around your stuff is basically like having the Inquisition coming after you. So he was only funneling out small amounts at a time. Small to him, that is. But in 2008, he took advantage of the GFC and funneled out a shit-ton of money. No one questioned one of the state’s wealthiest men suddenly losing a third of his fortune, because back then, things were shitty for almost everyone. A lot of rich people lost big.”

“True.”

“He masked it all as investments gone bad. Companies going broke and so on. Of course, they were just bullshit shell companies.” She shook her head slowly. “Anyway, my point is, he clearly wanted a lot of his money elsewhere, so if things ever blew up here, he and his cronies could leave and still have a ton of cash to play with.”

“Makes sense.”

She tilted her chin slightly to one side. “Now, this is actually a good thing for us. If his money is split in just two directions, which it is, then that means he only ever had two places to go. He’s already burned one of them, so that means he has to be in Costa Rica. It’s the only other place he has money.”

I nodded slowly. “That’s true.”

“Obviously he can never touch the fortune he left here, because then we’d all know he was still alive. Besides, it was frozen by the government anyway, given the nature of his crimes. That’s why Jolie never inherited it, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, he’s never tried to touch it or get it unfrozen. So I can only conclude that the cult is definitely in Costa Rica. Like I said, it’s the only place Chastain has accessible money. That narrows down our search quite a lot.”

“Well, now I’m kinda glad I didn’t kill Lauren,” I said, rubbing my jaw. “She really gave up the goods.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Beck said in an acid tone, brows dipping.

She stood up and turned around to pour herself another cup of coffee from the warmer jug behind her desk. “We still have a fairly long road ahead. Even though we know the cult is in Costa Rica, we don’t know exactly where,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “But it’s still a great start.”

I nodded. “It is.”

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