I leaned forward.
“It’s in another cloud.” He sighed. “Fuck, this may take a while.”
All of us decided to take a break while Bolt worked. We filled our coffee cups and walked down to the beach. The evening air felt good and helped erase some of the exhaustion that had started to leave a mark on all of us. The beach reminded me of Damien, and the first time we made love. I wished I could rewind time to that moment—before I knew how much brimstone was going to be rained on our lives. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but it would have still been nice to live in that moment for another day—I would have settled for a single solitary minute—just to feel Damien’s arms around me.
“Come back!” Bolt motioned to us from the villa. “I’m in!”
“He’s amazing…” I looked over at Anna.
“I know.” She smiled.
“Way more impressive than one of Dylan Benson’s keg stands.” I nudged her.
“Say what now?” Taylor glanced over at us.
“Taylor’s married to Dylan’s dad.” Anna gave me a look that simply said shut-the-hell-up.
“Oh!” I blinked in surprise.
We made it back to the villa before I got another opportunity to stick my foot in my mouth. The cloud that held Edgar’s personal email account was a lot easier to break into than the one that was backed up by Sinn Technology’s firewall. It was a good thing Bolt didn’t actually want to cause damage with his hacking skills because he was extremely talented. Bolt mirrored the cloud with all of Edgar’s personal emails, and then we went to work. He didn’t seem to be very forthcoming in his emails—there were a lot of them that were very vague and ended with call me. I didn’t expect to find a full confession—but if we could find anything that pointed to illegal activity, we might be able to convince someone with authority to ask for one to sit him down in a room.
“I’ve got something.” Anna pulled something up on her screen. “It looks like a draft for wedding invitations. Jenny is apparently marrying someone named Giovanni De Luca.”
“Who the hell is that? He definitely doesn’t go to our school…” Bolt started typing on his screen. “Oh shit. That guy his bad news. He’s been arrested a few times.”
“For what?” Taylor raised her eyebrows.
“Nothing that stuck apparently.” Bolt stared at his screen. “Here’s something—apparently there was an investigation into his family for money laundering and racketeering.”
“De Luca—wait, wasn’t that the name on the email from before?” I flipped over and checked it. “Yeah, he was talking to someone with that same last name about protection.”
“So he got protection from them.” Bolt nodded. “In exchange for…”
“Jenny.” Anna interrupted her boyfriend. “He traded his daughter for protection while he was in prison!”
“No way.” I shook my head back and forth. “Nobody is that freaking heartless.”
“I don’t know if that’s everything.” Bolt shook his head. “There are other emails here. Their business relationship goes back a long time. Way before Edgar went to prison. There’s a lot of talk about transactions and money—before and after he got popped for Securities Fraud.”
“Okay, here’s something…” Taylor leaned forward. “I figured I would just start at the very first email. Edgar sent a proposal for some sort of joint venture between Sinn Technology and a company that the De Luca family-owned.”
“So maybe it was legit at first?” I looked over at her.
“Yeah, this looks pretty standard.” She nodded. “I’m going to keep reading.”
“We need a timeline.” Anna took out a few pieces of paper and laid them out. “Read off anything that seems interesting with the date, and I’ll keep track of it.”
Being able to access Edgar’s email did more to rejuvenate the room than coffee. The emails were vague if read individually, but once we started laying them out, we were able to line up the business transactions. Bolt came up with an idea to check those dates against big press releases for Sinn Technology, and that helped us piece together a few more elements of the timeline. He expanded that to include financial statements from Sinn Technology, and we were able to pinpoint a few interesting dates where an increase in Edgar’s email traffic with the De Luca family preceded a huge influx of cash at Sinn Technology.
“I think Sinn Technology is laundering money for the De Luca Family.” Taylor put her laptop down and reached for her coffee. “We would need a forensic accountant to really dig into this, but when you compare Edgar’s emails to the financial reports…”
“I guess this would explain why Edgar forced Damien out of the company.” I sighed. “He probably knew Damien wouldn’t go along with it.”
“I think you’re right.” Bolt nodded. “It stopped after Edgar went to prison and didn’t resume until he took over as CEO.”
“Is this enough?” I looked around the room. “Do you think we can stop the wedding?”
“I don’t know.” Taylor sighed. “Let me call my husband.”