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“I have no idea where you’d find him these days.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Three years ago,” Ellen said.
“Can I ask what happened?”
She sighed. “For Charlie, everything was a fight with the world, with reality. Everything that happened to him was an injustice, some curse on him. He lost a couple of good jobs because of that way of thinking, and he just started to spiral down, Alex. I don’t think me or you or anyone else could have stopped that.”
“He doesn’t contact you?”
“Blocked him about a year ago. He kept calling and asking for cash that he said he’d pay back but never did.”
“That’s tough.”
“I have to go, Alex. My shift starts in a half hour.”
“One more question, Ellen,” I said. “What was Charlie’s last known address?”
“Someplace in DC,” she said. “He never contacted you?”
“No.”
“Kind of sad.”
“It is.”
“What’s going on? Why are you trying to find him, Alex?”
I didn’t tell her my fears about the John Doe; instead, I told her about Nana Mama and said I wanted to give Charlie the chance to see her again.
“Oh,” she said, sounding relieved. “I’m sorry about your grandmother, Alex. I always liked her and I wish her only the best, but at first I thought you were calling to tell me Charlie was dead.”
65
BREE WENT TO HER office at the Bluestone Group early to finish up some reports. She had only just settled in front of her computer when she heard a quick rap on her door.
She looked up to find her boss, Elena Martin, standing there holding a cup of coffee. She wore a sharp beige suit and a stern expression.
She set the coffee in front of Bree. “Latte with cinnamon. Hope you like it.”
“Thank you, Elena.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “So. I hear you paid a visit to Frost and Lear.”
“I did,” Bree replied. “There’s something funky about them, and from what I understand, we have several clients interested in investing with them.”
“We do. But I cannot recollect a single client requesting that we look at them.”
Bree felt the heat come to her face. “Trying to be proactive.”
“Without being able to bill for your time and unique skills,” Martin said.
“I figured if I was right, the goodwill would pay off down the line.”
Her boss studied her with an arched eyebrow. “It has. In a roundabout way.” Martin took a chair. “Frost and Lear reached out to a potential investor to see if she had hired you and Bluestone to look into them. The investor—we’ll call her Rosalynn—said no. But what Rosalynn neglected to tell them was that she is an old and dear friend of mine,” Martin said. “She called me to give me fair warning.”
It turned out that Rosalynn had done her own due diligence when F and L approached her for funding a while back, and she had not liked what she’d found. Lear and Frost and several early investors were shielded from scrutiny by a baffling number of shell companies and offshore accounts, and the firm insisted on using anonymous cryptocurrency in many transactions.
