Page 36 of Sex, Lies, & Techy Guys (Love on the Sunshine Coast)

I’m fumbling words in my head when Penny says, “I can’t believe you guys stooped so low. Whose idea was it? Your own, the lawyer, the billionaire, my ex… Who? I deserve to know that much.”

Kyle starts to talk but I motion for him to give me a second. “Penny, there was no plan. Everything that happened between us was real. Please believe that much is true.”

She shakes her head and Mila squeezes her hand. “I’m physically ill at the sight of you. What you did wasn’t…” She lowers her gaze to her lap. Mila puts both hands around hers but Penny slides one free and grabs her phone from the coffee table. After the press of a button, it seems to be going through a turning on sequence.

Penny continues, “You said you can help me, but I’m going to help myself. I can’t believe all of you thought I would cower. I was going to wait and do a big reveal at the trial but there’s no reason to drag it out.”

She dials and puts the phone to her ear. Who the hell is she calling, and why? We all look at each other. Mila doesn’t even seem to know. I make out a man’s voicemail message but can’t decipher who it is.

“Hey, John, would it be grounds for a mistrial if—”

As soon as the name John is out of her mouth, I’m lunging across the room, grabbing the phone from her hand, ending the call.

“Give my phone back. If you want to help, why can’t I tell my lawyer about us? The evidence should be thrown out and your professional integrity questioned, I’ll be off the hook.” She fumes.

“You haven’t told him about us yet?” I’d presumed she met with her lawyer after we left but if she didn’t, that would explain why we hadn’t gotten a call from ours.

“You’re not going to talk me out of it.”

My plea comes out harsher than I intended. “We don’t want to. Just hear us out.”

“Oh what, I beat you to the punch. You want to be the heroes to get the mistrial declared, and save the day?” She reaches for her phone and Mila looks like she’s about to castrate me but Kyle intervenes.

“You have every right not to believe us,” he says. “But there are some things you don’t know, and since Tony outed us as his IT guys, I guess we can address it. We were hired by Tony Albrecht to collect evidence, and we did, but there were pieces missing, namely the ones that would have clenched your connection to the theft. We’re good at what we do, so it’s safe to say they were missing because they don’t exist. It’s hard to be certain if a jury would understand the importance of those pieces. It’s hard to say how the lawyer could twist them and even how the judge would decipher them. Cybercrimes like this are too new, so we submitted a report and in it we clearly state that you do not appear to be involved as anything more than a pawn. After scouring the dark web and talking to criminals, we couldn’t find anything or anyone to actually link you or an alias suspected to be you to the actual theft. Best we can tell, the money was run through your account which makes you look like a convenience.”

“What happened to all of your treasured confidentiality? Oh, right, it was all a lie. That’s much more elegant and confusing than me getting a mistrial declared. Can I use your phone, Mila?”

I beg. “No. We don’t want you to call because we want to prove your innocence. It’s the only way you can get out from under this.”

She flops her hand toward Mila but stares at us. “It’s all bullshit. You produced evidence to be used against Penelope. You knew that I, or she, would likely go to jail. The lawyer doesn’t have to read your letter in court just like you didn’t have to insist it be read in the conference room. You were going to sit back and let them skewer me.”

“We were in shock. We weren’t even supposed to be at the meeting.” I glance at Kyle who’s fidgeting.

He jumps in when I pause. “We’ve had time to sort everything out since then.”

I keep going. “We’re breaking our nondisclosure agreement by coming to you. We’re risking our identities on the dark web. If any of this goes public, people can put together that we were the ones poking around. We’re risking everything by coming to you. But we don’t want the judge to throw the case out, we want to put our skills to use for you so we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you weren’t involved.”

She stares at us. “You would do that for me?”

“We wrote the report for Penelope, but we’ll do even more for you. We’ll protect you, risk everything for you. We’ve broken our contract and won’t get paid. In fact, Tony could sue us for the payments that have already been made and we’ll be blacklisted. But it’s worth it to definitively clear your name.”

“Shit,” Mila says. She shrugs and her eyes are big.

Penny’s expression softens. “Do you really think you can prove I’m innocent?”

“Work with us, we need time before you say anything. Once we get the evidence together, you can take it to your lawyer.”

“Okay.” She glances at Mila who nods. “How do we prove that I’m innocent?”

“What do you know about your husband after he left you?”

Penny’s voice is laced with disappointment. “I told you. He ghosted me. Thanks for adding another sore point to the mix.”

“Sorry, but there’s something fishy about his disappearance. He didn’t just stop talking to you, his entire digital footprint vanished. So, our initial conclusion was that either he’s involved and knew how to cover his tracks or someone helped him.”

Kyle says, “There’s evidence that he got mixed up with some bad guys, but we only found a few pieces of communication and it doesn’t entirely make sense because it could mean he worked for the government.”

“Nope. He was a financial consultant, and I was foolish enough not to realize that he must have loved money more than I thought.”

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