Dangerous Allies (The Ruby Danger Series Book 1) (20 page)

R
uby drove
Hari’s battered Jaguar north, miles out of the city, and parked on a lonely country road. She and Charlie huddled under a blanket in the back seat, their breath turning to frost. It was too cold to sleep, but because the attack on Hari replayed in an endless loop every time she closed her eyes it hardly mattered.

In the morning, she drove through subdivisions and past strip malls, stopping to buy breakfast at a coffee shop drive-through. Charlie devoured his egg-and-sausage sandwich in seconds, but Ruby could barely get to the bottom of a small coffee without choking.

She drove aimlessly until an outdoor parking lot next to a small office building caught her eye. She parked the Jaguar on a side street and tucked the keys under the visor. With Charlie trotting beside her, she strolled up the street and turned the corner.

In the parking lot kiosk, a gray-haired man with a gaunt face leaned over the open half door. Ruby bent over to fiddle with Charlie’s collar, glancing sidelong at the attendant, while a young woman with rumpled hair and a tired expression parked her SUV and strode to the kiosk. A small boy in thick corduroy pants and an oversized sweater toddled along with his hand clasped in hers.

Ruby crossed the pavement and stepped up behind them. The woman released the boy’s hand so she could rummage for change in her wallet. Charlie peered around Ruby’s legs.

“Look, Mommie, a doggie,” the boy squealed, his arm reaching out.

Glancing down at the terrier, Ruby inclined her head.

“Charlie,” she whispered.

The little dog looked up at her, his eyes bright.

“Go,”
she hissed.

Charlie took off across the parking lot.

“Doggie,” squealed the boy, running after him.

Within seconds, Charlie was going gangbusters with his little legs a blur and his ears folded back. When he reached the sidewalk, he skittered to the right and disappeared behind a hedge and along a deserted side street.

The little boy tottered across the parking lot after Charlie, laughing and waving his arms.

Ruby watched him, holding her breath.

Wait … wait …

“Look out! That kid is headed for the street,” she yelled.

The woman shrieked, dropped her change purse, and sprinted after the toddler.

“What’s happening?” the attendant said, craning his head out over the door’s bottom half.

Ruby waved her arms.

“I think there’s a car coming!”

The attendant shoved open the door and hurried after the woman and child, his progress hampered by a pronounced limp. Ruby watched him and then stepped into the kiosk, grabbing a set of keys from the board on the wall. She whirled around and clicked. An Audi beeped, but it was hemmed in by another car.

The attendant reached the corner and disappeared behind the hedge, still limping.

“Is he okay?” he hollered.

“Yes, he’s fine,” a fainter voice replied. “I’ve got him.”

Shit.

Ruby dropped the keys, reached for another set and clicked again. Lights flashed on an Odyssey minivan. She ran over to it, pulled back the sliding door on the driver’s side, tossed in her tote bag and scrambled in after it.

The young woman walked back around the hedge with the little boy squirming in her arms and the attendant limping alongside. The attendant reached out an arm and ruffled the boy’s hair, then looked up sharply as the minivan jerked from its parking space.

“Hey!” he yelled.

Ruby floored the accelerator. Turning onto the side street, she looked in the rearview mirror. The attendant was shouting, but not pursuing. She bit her lip. Great. Now CNN could add ‘grand theft auto’ to her growing rap sheet.

Four blocks later she caught up to Charlie, peeing on a tree. Ruby hit the brakes and lowered the window.

“Charlie, get over here,” she called, pushing a button to open the sliding back door.

The little dog trotted across the road to the minivan and stopped two feet away, bending his back legs for traction while his claws scrabbled on the pavement. He leapt into the air, sailing through the open door and onto the back seat. The terrier scrambled between the two front seats and into the shotgun position.

“Nice jump, Charlie.”

He acknowledged her praise with a slight nod, his attention now fixed on the road ahead.

They drove east until Ruby spotted the Sta-A-While, an aging motel tucked back from the highway at a four-way intersection anchored with gas stations and donut shops. After paying cash, she stopped at the vending machines in the hall for chips, a cellophane wrapped sandwich, and half a dozen colas. She waited for the chilled cans to trundle into the bin, stuffing them one by one into her tote bag. In her room, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her coat on the floor and climbed wearily onto the bed without even glancing around.

C
harlie’s whimpering
woke her six hours later. Ruby fumbled for a bag of chips on the nightstand, ripped it open and dropped it on the floor. The little dog devoured the chips, then buried his snout in the crinkly bag and pushed it around the room to reach the last crumbs. He shook his bag-covered head as a last resort, which threw the bag up into the air, showering him with salt and crunchy morsels. Charlie barked when the bag hit the floor.

Ruby chuckled, but her smile quickly faded. She couldn’t stop thinking of Hari crumpling to the ground, his face contorted in pain, blood pooling around his body. She tried to push those thoughts away.

Thing was, it made no sense. If Dimitri already had the bonds, as Mila had insisted, then why did he kill Hari? Because if Dimitri belonged to the Russian mob, then the mob had the bonds.

So either Mila had lied and Dimitri didn’t have them, or … Ruby sat straight up. Dimitri intended to double-cross the mob. He wanted the bonds for himself. And what better way to avoid suspicion than to insist that Ruby still had them? That would explain why Hari had to die. Because he knew Ruby didn’t have the bonds. And he would have told Viktor that if he had come looking for them. Which meant Dimitri would come after Ruby next. To silence her.

For several seconds, she forgot to breathe.

Things couldn’t get much worse. Unless … If the mob suspected Dimitri, he could torture Ruby into supposedly giving him the bonds. Then he could put a bullet in her head, ‘return’ the bonds to the mob and be considered a hero. For the first time in her life she regretted having read so many bad scripts.

She could still call the police and take her chances with the SEC. The girls’ nest egg would be gone, though. And she would not be able to clear Quentin’s name, or her own. And what about the bruises on Mila’s arm? Had that been Dimitri? The mobsters? Or someone else?

Ruby massaged her aching temples.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed with the television remote in her hand, she clicked on CNN. A newscaster was speaking, but it was the scrolling caption at the bottom of the screen that riveted her attention.
Actress Ruby Delaney sought by police as a person of interest in the disappearance and suspected murder of Wall Street financier Hari Bhatt. I
t was on a loop that repeated every few minutes. Ruby stared at the television with her mouth open and her throat tightening. She turned up the sound.

‘… a former TV actress who turned to alcohol and pills after a family tragedy and who, police now believe, faked her own death …’ The police had not found Hari’s body in the parking garage, but vivid details about a pool of blood on the concrete floor sent Ruby running into the motel room’s washroom. Afterward she leaned both hands on the sink, staring with unfocused eyes into the mirror, until the jangle of a news alert drew her back to the television.

The police had found Hari’s Jaguar. The station showed a crane hoisting the car onto a flatbed truck. When the camera zeroed in for a close-up of the shattered driver’s window, Ruby held her breath. Her fingerprints were all over that car. She closed her eyes with a long exhale. Not that it mattered now.

There was also a startling new twist in the case. On Wall Street, Carvon’s share price had plunged. The company’s missing CFO, Hari Bhatt, was considered by the Street to be integral to Carvon’s operation. Shareholders were bailing.

Carvon’s CEO Antony Carver, who was ‘devastated by this latest tragedy,’ according to a company spokesman, had declined to be interviewed. So CNN interviewed a prominent analyst instead. The analyst talked about revenue shortfalls and mysterious accounting breaches and other incomprehensible jargon.

‘The short-sellers are making a killing today,’ he concluded with a smile.

Even the reporter winced at that one.

Ruby swung her legs over the bed and muted the sound.
Short sellers.
Antony knew better than anyone when the Carvon share price would drop. Was he also ‘making a killing’?

Charlie whimpered at her feet and Ruby glanced down.

“I’ll take you out in a minute, sweetie.”

The terrier attacked the empty chip bag again and shook it, growling, until he backed into the leather tote bag. He whirled around, barking at whatever had bitten him on the tush. Ruby smiled and bent down to throw her bag back onto the bed. As she did so, she remembered that Hari had said there were things in the car she needed to see.

Things, plural. Which meant more than Charlie.

She pulled the Hello Kitty bracelet from her tote bag, snapped it open, and slid the USB connector into her laptop. The documents she had copied on the Apollonis were still on the USB drive. But according to the list of contents on the laptop, those files had been altered.

Ruby checked the clock on the night table. This was going to take time, maybe all night. Reaching for a cola, she snapped open the tab and settled in to read.

I
t was
three a.m. before she found the name she had been hunting for, but hoped she wouldn’t see.

Charlie was curled up on the bed, yelping and scrabbling with his paws as he chased squirrels in his sleep. Ruby had downed a flood of cola to keep from following him into dreamland, where she expected to confront worse things than scampering rodents.

The documents were heavy reading. Carvon was a holding company that had acquired dozens of legitimate subsidiaries over the years. But Hari had told her that Antony siphoned cash from Carvon to dummy companies. So she assumed the statements on the USB drive referred to those fake businesses.

Hari had highlighted transactions and added notations, such as ‘
to company x
,’ or ‘
from company y
,’ or even, ‘
!!!
’. There were hundreds of annotations. Ruby closed her eyes, massaging the bridge of her nose. How would she ever make sense of it? Shaking her head, she clicked on yet another file.

This was the list of deposits to the offshore account, the one she had seen on the Apollonis. But Hari had added a number beside each deposit that corresponded to a series of numbered folders. Each folder contained statements for an individual account.

Ruby clicked on each folder in turn until she found one titled Quentin Wade
.

Her brother-in-law.

She squinted at the screen, puffing air through her lips. Was this the girls’ money? The statement looked like the one she had picked up during her last visit to Vancouver. Ruby rummaged through her tote bag, slid out the mangled document and checked it against the account in the folder. The statement in her hand showed a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. Apple, IBM, Toyota. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But there were no Apple, IBM, or Toyota shares in the second account, the one in the numbered folder on her laptop. That account showed dozens of trades but only one stock. Carvon & Co.

Not only that, but the Carvon trades had been profitable short sales. Most of the gains had been transferred to the offshore account, but the amount of cash left was still ten times higher than the insurance settlement Quentin had invested for the girls.

According to the statement, Quentin Wade opened this second account with a deposit that matched the amount of the insurance settlement. And that original deposit had come from the girls’ trust fund.

So Hari had been right when he said the girls’ account was empty.

Ruby lowered her head between her knees, fighting nausea, trying to remember what Antony had said on the Apollonis.
You’re the one who’s going to get burned. You and your dumb-ass brother-in-law.

So this was what he meant.

The other statements showed similar withdrawals which had also gone into the offshore account. Those must be the dummy companies set up by Antony. Most of those accounts had been cleaned out and closed.

About a dozen accounts were still active, including Quentin’s. All the active accounts showed massive pending short-sale contracts for Carvon shares. When the stock plummeted after the shareholders’ meeting, each would be worth millions more.

But Carvon’s stock had plunged ahead of schedule, after Hari’s disappearance. So these trades were already profitable. Antony could clean out the accounts and leave town immediately. He wouldn’t have to wait for the shareholders’ meeting. And he would leave behind evidence that Quentin Wade made millions short-selling Carvon stock after obtaining illegal inside information from his sister-in-law Ruby Delaney, a.k.a. Mrs. Antony Carver.

Ruby lowered her head into her hands and waited for her stomach to stop churning. As bad as this was, it wasn’t the entire story. What about the honest investors, the retirees whom the accountant in Boca Raton had mentioned? Their shares would be worthless. They would never recover, the accountant had said. She shook her head to clear the memory. What was she supposed to do about that?

With a heavy hand, she clicked the files closed one by one. One last folder, labeled Caracas, caught her eye. It must be the travel itinerary she saw on the Apollonis. Tapping her fingers on the keyboard, she stared at the file. Maybe she missed something. She opened it and scanned to the bottom.

Sure enough, there had been a late addition. A water taxi service in Toronto. Ruby picked up the phone by the bed and punched in the number, hoping the service was open at five a.m.