Reckoning (Wolfes of Manhattan 5)

“You bitch.”

“Don’t you fucking move,” I said. “I’ve got you dead to rights. You, Fonda, and Hank Morgan. And you’re all going to pay for putting me through this shit.”

“You’re bluffing.”

He was right, but I was all in now. “You want to take that chance? My husband has our entire suite wired. We’re watching everything. How do you think I knew Fonda would be at that shoot today?”

“Fuck,” he said. “What do you want, then? What will it take for you to let us go?”

“The evidence. Right here. Right now.”

“It’s not here.”

“Then take me to it.”

“But Fonda’s almost done with her shoot. I’m supposed to meet her afterward.”

“I guess she’ll just have to wait, won’t she? Where’s the evidence?”

“Please.” He stayed still, but his muscles tensed even further. “You’ll get us out of here. You have to.”

“Right now I don’t have to do anything except decide whether or not to pull this damned trigger. I’m not making any promises until I see what you have. Scratch that. I’m not making any guarantees until all the Wolfe siblings and I are cleared of this murder.”

Nothing for a few minutes.

Then he finally nodded. “You win. I’ll take you to what you need.”

52

Reid

Zee and Diamond stayed to deal with the women while Rock and I tore through the files and computer in the reception area, looking for evidence.

“Bro, we need a hacker,” Rock said.

I nodded. “We need Leif, but he’s not here. I know a little bit, but this code is encrypted and it’s different from anything I’ve seen.”

“You think Diamond knows?”

“I think she would have told us if she did. She already said the money is clean when it filters into the US.”

“Do you think any of the Wolfe Enterprises money is dirty?” Rock asked.

I shook my head. “It’s not. I have access to all those accounts. His dirty money comes from this enterprise, which, I’m happy to say, I knew nothing about until now.”

“Fuck. Is anyone going to believe we didn’t know anything about any of this?”

“They have to. We didn’t. We didn’t even know about Dad’s first wife. Mom never knew. He’s kept all of this tightly veiled over the years. I suppose we’ll never know why.”

“Yeah. Like why he’d drag his first-born son, his only legal child, into this mess but give us the legal enterprise?”

“He fucked us over in his own way.”

“Right. By making me move to New York and giving me what should have been yours.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’d like to say I’m over it. I am getting there, and you’re doing a bang-up job. Better than I thought you would.”

He smirked. “Turns out I kind of like it. I never thought I would, but running a business is a challenge. I’m learning a ton. Thanks to you.”

“We can do great things together, Rock,” I said earnestly. “We’ll take Wolfe from a three-billion-dollar enterprise to a one-hundred-billion-dollar enterprise. I’ve got lots of ideas.”

I continued tapping, entering code, trying my best to decipher, when I made it through the first door. “Bingo!”

“You got it?”

“Yeah. Except now it wants a password.” I turned the keyboard over.

My father would never be stupid enough to leave a password in plain sight. So of course there was nothing taped to the bottom of the keyboard.

I started typing furiously. Rock. Reid. Roy. Riley. Princess. Princesstrips. Irene. I tried all our birthdates.

“Fuck.” I scratched my head. My scalp itched. I still hadn’t had a shower in days.

“I can’t think of anything,” Rock said. “You want me to call Leif?”

“He’d have to get here. He can’t hack a computer over the phone.”

I typed in Diamond. Moonstone. Garnet. Onyx. Treasurehunt. Treasureisland.

Nothing.

“Try Fonda,” Rock said. “Try Jordan. Connie. Constance. Larson. Lucent.”

I tried them all.

Nothing.

I tried all the combinations of all the words I’d already tried. As many as I could think of.

I typed until I was sure my fingers would fall off.

And then—

“What about…”

I typed in the numbers slowly.

The date of my father’s death.

The date he meant to disappear, only to die instead.

I tapped each one, letting my finger hover over the last digit for a few seconds before—

Tap.

And the screen opened.

“I’ll be damned, bro,” Rock said.

“It was the date he thought he’d be free to live out the rest of his life here.”

“Do you think he was running from something? From us? From Mom?”

“He unloaded Mom years ago, and he was still abusing Riley. But he was looking forward to this for some reason.”

“Maybe he really loved Irene.”

I scratched the outer shell of my ear. “If that were the case, why Fonda? Why all the other women over the years? Why Riley?”

“I don’t know, man,” Rock said, “but take a look at those fucking numbers.”

My eyes went wide. “Oh. My. God.”

Account after account. Some in Switzerland, others in the Caymans. A few in the continental US, even. Together totaling billions.