Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (24 page)

I settled in to listen, out of habit taking
up position in my desk chair, poised to jot down notes and numbers.
There was a message from my mother, time-stamped Monday evening
about the time, I figured, Emily and I were crashing the LRG party.
Mom sounded deliberately neutral, asking how everything was going,
as though we hadn’t had several conversations earlier that day
about the stock market. I made a note to call her later just to
touch bases. There were the expected messages from Emily, telling
me all about things I now knew but, wedged between the Emily
messages, timestamped two-forty-five a.m. Tuesday, was a message
from Jennifer. Her voice sounded thin and worried and she spoke
quietly, as though she were keeping her voice intentionally
low.

“Hi Madeline. It’s me. Jennifer. I know it’s
the middle of the night but please pick up the phone I really,
really have to talk to you. I can’t... I can’t leave a number but
I’m not at home,” and then, as if she’d made a decision, “I’ll try
you again later.”

I played the message back a couple of times,
trying to squeeze information out of it, but there was nothing
there. I could read things into it — perhaps fear, maybe
apprehension — but I couldn’t be sure about anything. There just
wasn’t enough information.

Then more messages from Emily, another from
my mom and then, time-stamped just a few minutes before I’d gotten
in the door, a message from Alex Montoya, asking if I’d care to
join him for dinner some time.

I played Jennifer’s message another couple
of times before I called Tyler. He would, I felt certain, want to
hear it. The phone rang six times before his voicemail picked up. I
started to leave a message, then reasoned that I’d just seen him a
few minutes ago: they had to be home.

Tycho and I thundered up the stairs but I
could see before I knocked on Tyler and Tasya’s door that no one
was home. The house was in darkness and the kitchen door, when I
turned the knob, was locked. I peered over the edge of the deck
into the canyon. The rapidly falling darkness shrouded the details,
but I could make out a car’s taillights, moving quickly, towards
the beach. Tyler’s Lexus? Maybe. But I couldn’t worry about it now:
I’d play Jennifer’s message for him when I got the chance.

Back at the guesthouse, I thought about my
day and about what I’d accomplished. At the same time, I tried to
think about what I was
trying
to accomplish. Why was I even
bothering? The stuff with Jennifer was obvious: the child had more
or less adopted me on sight. If there was something I could do to
help her, I knew I’d do it.

But the mess with the Langton Regional Group
was another matter. Part of me just wanted to back away from LRG
entirely: sell my stocks, take my loss and pretend I’d never even
heard of Langton and that Ernie had never come back into my life.
Ernie’s own wife thought him capable of engineering a kidnapping in
order to make a stock price fall. My whole involvement with Langton
was a mess that showed every sign of getting messier.

I had missed the day’s close gallivanting
around West LA and I looked at my computer’s blank screen and
thought about checking where the markets had ended up and having a
look though my e-mail: there was likely to be a lot of it by now.
But the events of a full day came rushing over me in a wave. I
suddenly felt too tired to think about doing anything but pulling
off my clothes and crawling into bed. Which is what I did. And when
I slept, I didn’t dream at all.

Chapter Fourteen

The following morning it felt good to get up
before the opening bell and take Tycho for a run through the hills.
It’s quiet at that time of the morning. And fresh and cool. The
smell of Eucalyptus followed us down the narrow roads and well
defined trails. I’d discovered an old orange grove at the end of
our road, abandoned now because the house that used to be on the
grounds slid down the hill some years ago. Earthquake, mudslide or
bad planning on the part of some long forgotten architect, I didn’t
know. But I liked to go there and enjoy the overrun gardens and the
shade and scent of the citrus trees and think about what it must
have been like when there was a house here commanding this bit of
earth. Tycho liked it, too. A chance to snuffle around and examine
things of high interest to dogs. And, if I planned my run a certain
way, it was about the right distance from home to wind down a bit
and touch the earth before walking the final leg home. The run, the
gardens and the walk relaxed me totally.

Then home and coffee made by my own hand:
strong and good. Then to my computer.

As much trepidation as I felt about what
sorts of silliness LRG might get up to on this day, it didn’t stem
my excitement for the markets in the morning. This has been true
throughout my career, no matter how badly I might have been doing
the day before. I think it’s the pure possibility that excites me.
Because, within limits (at least, most of the time)
anything
can happen. From one day to the next, up can become down and down
can become what you were wishing for before you went to sleep the
night before. It’s this merry-go-round of what-ifs that pushes me
out of bed every morning. The promise of it all that draws me. All
of those possibilities.

Even though I’d only set up my newsfeeds a
week before, I was already under a deluge. Since most of it comes
to me in the form of e-mail, I get a lot. Two hundred or more
pieces of electronic e-mail a day. It’s pretty easy to get through,
though. Not at all like getting two hundred letters from friends. I
sort them all by date and then just whiz through them, quite often
scanning headlines and not bothering to read the whole item unless
it’s about a stock I’m currently holding or one I’m thinking about
buying.

This morning there were more than a day’s
worth because, with all of the running around I’d been doing, and
my unexpected exhaustion the night before, I hadn’t been spending
as much time as I usually did clearing my mail. So, this day, when
I asked for my mail, over five hundred pieces came barreling down
the pike at me. A little overwhelming, even for someone who is used
to regular barrages. It was going to take me a while to get through
them all, and I settled in.

I hadn’t gotten far into my scanning,
though, when a return e-mail address caught my eye:
[email protected]. Fee Waybill. Lead singer of The Tubes.
And Ernie’s college nickname. And since I don’t actually
know
the lead singer of The Tubes, personally — or even know
if The Tubes still exist as an entity — that left exactly one
person whom this could be from.

The subject line also grabbed my eye: a
salutation that included the pet name Ernie had called
me
during our time together. Pooky. I’d always hated it. I think he
must have thought it sounded posh: something you’d call a
girlfriend who summered at the Vineyard. Someone who pal’d around
with girls called Bunny and CJ. Someone who wasn’t me. Seeing those
names now, in the context of an e-mail, was oddly chilling. Like a
hand reaching out of the grave from the past I thought I’d buried a
long time ago. My hands weren’t steady as I read the message.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Hello Pooky

The reason for the nicknames should be
obvious: easy identification. I trust you get it.

I’ve gotten wind of some poking. You need to
stop. Alternatives could be unhealthy. All is under control. I
promise to explain soon and perhaps I can even make it worth your
while.

Your,

Fee

I sat and read and then reread the message.
And then I didn’t read it: just sat there hoping that the words on
the screen would somehow seep into my brain and make sense. There
was little doubt in my mind that it was from Ernie. The madlin
address was an old one — my first e-mail address. He must have
taken the chance that I’d kept it active: which I had. It forwarded
to the e-mail address I used most often, saving me from having to
check the numerous e-mail accounts I’ve set up and moved on from
over the years. For his part, anyone could set up a lookforthis.com
account in about a minute. And it was free and completely
untraceable. Lacking other possibilities, this really had to be
Ernie.

He’d said:
I trust you get it.
And I
did. And I
had
. But it was phrased in such a way that, if I
hadn’t kept the address and someone else had gotten the e-mail it
would make absolutely no sense and would likely have been trashed
as yet another piece of spam. But if I got it, I’d have no doubt
who it was from. It was a warning.
Alternatives could be
unhealthy.
A warning and a promise. And those things —
especially served up together — probably had the opposite effect on
me that he’d hoped: They made me mad.

I’ve gotten wind of some poking
.
Which could mean a lot of things but, really, boiled down to only
one: someone had told him I’d been at Langton the other day, which
meant he had contact with at least one person inside the company.
Or — and this seemed entirely likely — he’d seen the same news
report that Emily and I had seen and recognized me and was now
warning me off. He was right, though: poking pretty much summed up
what I’d been doing.

He’d written that he could possibly “even
make it worth my while” to stay out of this. So he thought he
could, what? Bribe me? I found myself seething and, even as I told
myself to breathe and let it go, I knew what was fueling
this
fire: Here was Ernie, thirteen years later still being
coldly controlling. Still thinking he could pull my strings and
make me dance. And with the LRG dance he was currently involved in,
he was completely raining on my parade.

I hit reply and began a message.

Dear Ernie,

Then thought about that and settled on

Ernie

Then decided even
that
was too
friendly and opted for no salutation at all. Which left me with a
blank message because I couldn’t think how to respond. Though
various expletives flitted through my brain there was little to be
accomplished by any of that. And without expletives, there was
nothing I could think to say. At least, not right this minute. I
put it aside and moved on to other tasks that would divert my
attention from Fee Waybill. Today, however, everything seemed
related.

Looking over my portfolio did nothing to
help my mood. LRG opened slightly above what it had closed at the
day before, it rallied briefly and then another large whack of LRG
shares — a market sell, no doubt — started pushing the stock price
down again. $4.25. $4.18. $4.27. $4.16. And so on. I stopped
watching. It was too painful. I was too mad.

“Sonofabitch.” I said it aloud, but quietly.
Tycho thumped his tail at me. Cocked his head. It hadn’t sounded
angry, but he couldn’t quite place the tone.

Last night, in defeated exhaustion, I’d
determined to sell my LRG shares at a loss and wash my hands of the
whole thing. Now rested, refreshed and awash with rekindled old
resentments I hadn’t even realized I’d hung onto, things didn’t
look the same.

Alternatives could be unhealthy. All is
under control.

“Jerk!”

Jerk in so many ways, too. Never mind that
his machinations had upset my personal applecart, if he really
had
kidnapped himself in order to make the stock of the
company he had been newly employed by go
down
, he didn’t
have even a quarter of the intelligence I’d always given him credit
for. I’d always known he thought he was a force unto himself —
above things like the laws and moral imperatives that other people
feel compelled to function under — but there were lines. And
this... this sincerely crossed all of them.

I thought about the calculations on the
paper Arianna had found. If she and I were interpreting it right,
we were talking about over forty million dollars for a week or so
of being “kidnapped.” There weren’t a lot of ways to make that kind
of money.

And then what? What could possibly be next?
Would he be miraculously recovered somehow? In some splashy manner
that made headlines and caused the stock to go up. Is that what he
was planning? And at what point? What had the paper Arianna had
shown me forecast as the low point? I thought about it.
Three
bucks? And if that happened, I’d be down fifty
percent. Or about seventy thousand dollar if I converted all those
figures into a dollar amount, which didn’t seem prudent for my
mental health at this moment.

And then something Alex Montoya had said at
Tyler’s party popped into my head. I could see Alex sitting forward
intently, wineglass in hand, talking to me with great passion about
his work. Thinking about it now, I could almost feel gears clicking
into place.

What if Ernie was a psychopath? The quest
for new highs, the lack of conscience and morals, all of it added
up. I still had the concept of the eater of human flesh flitting
around my brain and I figured Ernie was into Kobi beef and grilled
chicken rather than anything more exotic. But kidnapping? That was
too weird.

And I knew that Ernie couldn’t be doing this
by himself. He’d need someone unattached to him professionally to
be doing the actual selling and buying of the stocks. Since stock
transactions are entirely traceable, if that invisible someone had
a leg up on the shady side of trading and maybe didn’t have a lot
to lose, so much the better. All of this added up quite neatly to
Ernie’s Harvard toady, Paul Westbrook. Someone I wouldn’t have
thought of at all had his name not come up in my conversation with
Arianna.