“Can you get me Chuck’s phone number?” Again her instincts were flaring. Right as she needed to talk to the head of security, he mysteriously decided to quit a job he’d claimed to love? It didn’t make sense.
“Of course,” Cathy promised. “And I’ll pull any requisition that matches these numbers. It’s probably that the account number was wrong and the other teams got it screwed up. It’s happened before. Don’t worry about it. Now, you’ve got a meeting with your team at noon. The new round of data is in and I’ve heard it’s phenomenal.”
She’d heard she would be happy with it, too. She was so close to being able to really push this new therapy.
It would be all right. Owen would help her figure out what was going on, and by this time next month, she would be writing up her paper and potentially taking on a wave of new research money. Then the big trials would begin and she would be one step closer to fulfilling the promise she’d made to herself the day her mother died.
She was already closer to the promise she’d made to her mother. Owen was making her happy, and she needed to concentrate on that.
Still, her curiosity was getting the best of her. “Could you clear my calendar for Friday afternoon?”
A brilliant smile crossed Cathy’s face. “Of course. You’re seeing your man again?”
She hoped Owen could take a long lunch break. She wasn’t dumb enough to go alone, but she needed to know who was going to be waiting for her there. “Yes, I’ll definitely be seeing him.”
Cathy started to talk about plans to have a double date night or to possibly have Owen out for dinner. Becca wasn’t completely sure that meeting Cathy and her crazy family wouldn’t make Owen run, but she nodded. Out on the floor, her team was buzzing around, prepping for the meeting later on.
Her eyes caught on a man delivering mail. It was just a glimpse of light brown hair and broad shoulders. There was something about the man that made her go still, pure terror seizing through her.
You should run, Dr. Walsh. Or I might have to show you why they call me Razor.
Bile rose in her throat and when she looked again, the man was gone.
“Becca? You went white.” Cathy stood in front of her, blocking her sight of the place where he’d stood.
Except he couldn’t stand because he was dead. Dead and gone. Now she was seeing ghosts.
She shook off the feeling. She was being paranoid. It was all about what had happened that Saturday night. It reminded her of the other time she’d been sure someone was stalking her. Of course that time, she’d been right and she’d run.
She wasn’t going to think about that man…that monster again. He had no power over her. “I’m fine. I had too much coffee, that’s all. I’m going to get ready for the meeting. And thanks for trying to look up that paperwork.”
She stayed there while Cathy went to work. Becca sat there trying to convince herself that the past was in the past.
After all, she’d just found her future.
“What do you mean the money leads back to Becca?” Owen felt his whole body go tight as Phoebe’s words sank in.
“I mean the money was moved from her research accounts to her charitable foundation. It was run through a Swiss account, but the numbers match up,” Phoebe replied over the connection through the computer. She was sitting in her beautifully decorated office in the middle of downtown Dallas. Phoebe Murdoch was a lovely woman with dark hair and intelligent eyes. She was wearing glasses and looked far more like the accountant she’d claimed to be for years than the CIA operative her accounting job covered for. She had a degree in accounting and had worked many jobs untangling financial data for both the Agency and then McKay-Taggart.
She reminded him a bit of his Becca, but he did not like what she was saying.
It wasn’t true.
“You haven’t had a long time with that data,” Robert pointed out.
The gang was all here. All except Tucker and Sasha, who were working at Huisman, and Nina, who had a shift at the café.
“She’s had days with it.” Ezra sighed and sat back. They were at Ezra and Tucker’s place across town. It was a nice-sized apartment with a view of the CN Tower. Tucker was right. Ezra was definitely a minimalist. There was no furniture in the living room, merely this long table and a bunch of folding chairs. It was his version of a conference room on the run, Owen suspected. There were two large white boards on wheels. One tracked where the central players were and everything they knew about Hope McDonald’s operation. The other had information on Rebecca Walsh.
He hated that board, hated the fact that she’d been pared down to nothing but facts and theories about how involved she’d been in McDonald’s research.
He could answer that. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Phoebe leaned toward the camera. “Owen’s right. I’ve only had a couple of days with this but I wanted to let you know the preliminary results. According to what I’ve found, that money moved from one of her accounts to a single Swiss account, and then to her charity in the form of donations. They were done as wire transfers, so I can’t compare signatures, and obviously the Swiss do not share information on their account holders. Adam might be able to figure it out, but we try to keep the boss out of jail for hacking.”
Jax might be able to do it, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t already wanted for even worse crimes. But the truth was he didn’t need to see someone else’s name on the account to know that it wasn’t hers.
“She didn’t do it,” he insisted. “If she did it, why would she have asked me to come to you? She gave me the data. She gave me permission to give it to you.”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe replied. “Maybe she’s being set up. Does she have enemies?”
He held on to that thread. “Of course she does. The same one we have. Levi. This is his plan. He’s going to go to her and offer to not turn her in if she hands over that damn box McDonald sent to her.”
“It sounds like something Levi would do,” Ezra agreed. “It’s straight out of his playbook. He knows how to gain leverage and then use it to his own ends.”
Phoebe was shaking her head. “These go back almost a year. I thought you said Levi didn’t find out about the package until a couple of months ago. Whoever is doing this has been planning it for far longer than a few months.”
Dante leaned forward. “Could Mr. Green have known about the doctor for longer? Solo got us the intelligence, right? Could she have lied?”
He didn’t want to believe that of her, but he certainly didn’t believe Becca was a thief. “We have to consider it.”
Robert gave him a “what the hell” look. “I don’t think Solo would lie about this. She doesn’t have a reason to.”
“She’s always got a reason,” Ezra said, his bitterness soaking through his tone. “However, I still have some sources at the Agency I trust and they confirmed what Solo told us. Levi didn’t know there was anything but a professional connection between Walsh and McDonald until a few weeks before the Colorado op. Not even that fucker can backdate bank transfers. Not in that way.”
“I’ll keep looking into this,” Phoebe promised. “It doesn’t make sense that she would turn this over to a forensic accountant if she knew she was the one who’d done it. But I will tell you that her charity foundation was on shaky ground before this influx of cash. I’m not sure how she wouldn’t know about the money and question it.”
“You said they were donations.” He wasn’t about to explain that Becca’s attention was on her research and she struggled to divide her focus. She wasn’t a multitasker. She gave everything she did one hundred percent of her attention. From what she’d told him, she was close to making her breakthrough. She wouldn’t question the donations. “Were they done anonymously?”
“Of course,” Phoebe replied. “Another thing that should have made her suspect something was going on. Large anonymous donations should have tipped her off.”
She didn’t think that way. “Rebecca is na?ve about a lot of things. She’s also an optimist.”