Page 24 of Only the Devil
“Not sure.” She pulls out a barstool and sits. “That’s how the paper described it and there was no follow-up article that I could find. There were facts and figures about suicides and finance at the bottom of the article, which makes me think they believed it was suicide.”
“Why not say that? Why use the word mysterious?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a cultural thing? It was a Singapore paper. Never made the US news, at least that came up in a search. When I first searched in ARGUS, the results labeled it suicide.”
Her perky nipples jut from her faded Matrix T-shirt in a way that beg for attention.
Of course, I shouldn’t be looking at her chest and aim to focus on her face but fail. Repeatedly.
She’s beautiful, smart, and completely off-limits. Perfect combination for disaster.
“It’s just…these deaths… Am I looking for connections where they don’t exist?” She chews her nail, then drops her hand. “Am I connecting ghosts?”
She’s basically just bouncing ideas off me. I get that, but if I’m going to be useful, I need a better understanding.
“Look, I get that you think there’s a scam going on, but I don’t understand what it is. I’ve spent two days watching your colleagues across the street—they aren’t thugs. Can you tell me exactly what crime they’re doing?”
She sits up on the kitchen counter, coffee mug in hand, and to avoid staring at her bare thighs I pull out a kitchen chair and angle it to the window with a view of the glistening glass building across the street.
“I get it. It’s financial corruption. You believe Reed lost everything. He must have something to his case ’cause he was collecting names of others similarly impacted. But explain the crime to me. Tell it to me like I’m a third-grader. Pretend I’m your slow student. Big crayons.”
“Okay. You mean aside from targeting unsophisticated investors?”
I give a quick nod and take another sip of coffee.
She crosses one thigh over the other, and I can see the wheels turning as she tries to dumb it down, which is fine because my gaze can’t stop tracking her creamy, pale skin along that long stretch of thigh.
“Sterling pitches themselves as the future of finance—safe, exchange-traded crypto funds. Think S&P or Nasdaq trackers,” she says.
I set my mug down, watching the glass building across the street throw back a dull, pewter sky.
“They tell investors their baskets are weighted to Bitcoin and Ethereum,” she goes on, “diversified among them to spread risk. The AI project I’m hired for? ‘Next-gen’—auto-rebalance to keep everything ‘stable and low-risk.’”
I nod, ankle to knee. “And actually?”
She drums her fingers against the counter. “Actually, the allocations don’t match the pitch. The test baskets? Meme tokens. Joke coins. PooCoin. Fartcoin. Garlicoin. Some with no liquidity. Some dead. No longer in existence. My uncle’s fund was one of Sterling’s first offerings. He thought he was getting a safe, Bitcoin-weighted ETF. What he really got was garbage—meme coins disguised as ‘diversification.’ The fund collapsed, and he lost everything.”
I angle my chair away from her bare legs and toward the window. “So Reed bought a Bitcoin-heavy ETF and got a clown car.”
“Exactly.” She taps the mug, thinking. “Legally? They might be covered. The paperwork says high-risk assets may be included. That’s the catch.”
The AC kicks on; a distant siren fades. “So you haven’t uncovered a crime.”
“Not yet.” She crosses one thigh over the other. “But it smells like a pump-and-dump in drag—inflate volume, offload before collapse. I can’t prove it. Not yet.”
“And the deaths?”
She exhales. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Look at these three deaths. Alvin Reed—a man actively seeking other investors who lost money. The CFO in Singapore. The comptroller here. Three dots, three years, two countries. Maybe coincidence. But it’s a pattern.”
“True enough.” I cross an ankle over my knee, sitting back, mulling it over. “I mean, do I believe in coincidences? No. But we’re talking about three deaths over a three-year period in three different cities and two different countries.”
She nods, an acknowledgement that it’s a lot to connect and the kind of connection one finds with true police work, not sniffing around databases.
“What’re you thinking?”
“I’m honestly not sure. I mean, Phillip Sterling doesn’t come across as trustworthy, but in a ‘yeah, I’ll sell you a bridge that doesn’t exist’ kind of way, not in a ‘I’m a serial killer kind of way.’ He’s too polished.”
“Guys like that hire,” I say, pushing up and leaning back against the kitchen table to face her.
