Page 85 of The Suit

“Okay, why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I was caught up in the search, sorry. I would have told you Friday, but you didn’t come in,”

I ground my teeth. Friday I’d called Beulah. I’d been so pissed her assistant had fobbed me off to an associate on the case that I’d decided to drop by her office. Not sure what had possessed me to do it, probably because she’d stayed over then snuck out and I hadn’t heard a peep from her since, not even a sarcastic memo or snarky email. It bothered me more than I cared to admit, especially as I hadn’t stopped thinking about her, and I was pretty confident it was the same for her. But after I’d been royally dismissed a second time that day by her snooty assistant, I’d gone and found Penn, and made him entertain me for the rest of the afternoon.

“You could have called,” I snapped, annoyed that Diego had known too, though it was my fault.

Cody had a tendency to get so absorbed in the work he forgot the time, the day, even where he was. This wasn’t the first occasion it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. If I wanted to know something, I needed to be here. It was amazing he’d emailed me on Wednesday morning, even though I hadn’t seen it.

“Sorry, boss.” He tried to look contrite but failed dramatically, which at least raised a smile on my end. “So, anyway, that then led me to another three accounts, all with approximately fifty million dollars of assets in each.”

Huh, that was something.

“What sort of assets?”

“One owned a painting – just one fucking weird painting - the other had three cars in it, and I Googled them, they…”

My eyes flew open at that, cars were my domain. “What cars?”

“A Ford GT, a nineteen sixty-four Ferrari, and a nineteen fifty-nine Ferrari.”

I coughed out the air I’d managed to inhale into the wrong pipe.

What the fuck?!

Only thirty two of the nineteen sixty-four Ferraris were ever made, and I owned three of them. The fact they were being used in some fucking massive finance-scam-tax-evasion-fraud fuck up had my blood boiling quicker than anything Beulah had managed to provoke. It was sacrilege; owning cars of that stature should require multiple forms of identification, references, and background checks, not to mention an in-depth knowledge of the workings of each engine demonstrated via a weekend long examination.

“Boss?”

I focused back on Cody and not what I wanted to do to get my hands on those cars.

“What was in the third account?”

“A diamond that’s been missing since nineteen sixty-two.”

“What the fuck?”

“I know,” he replied, though I really didn’t think he did, because I wasn’t sure myself. How the fuck had all these pieces – immensely valuable pieces – been bought then vanished and no one had noticed?

“How has it been missing?”

He shrugged unhelpfully. “That was the last time it was recorded as sold, and no one’s seen it since.”

“Then what happened?”

“I set the program to run in the background on Saturday for any kind of connection while I was trying to trace the networks to Maynard.” Tension appeared in his tone, along with an underlying frustration flexing his jaw. “I kept tabs on them over the weekend, but yesterday when I came in, everything was missing.”

“Missing?”

“Yes.”

“What does ‘missing’ mean?”

His brows furrowed with a little annoyance at the speed at which I was struggling to keep up. “It means that all the accounts I’d found and was tracking have been emptied, and one was closed down.”

“What?” A loud, piercing ringing started up in my ears, “WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK?! HOW?!”

I jumped back as I crushed the half-full coffee cup in my hand, the hot liquid spraying up like lava.

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