Page 35 of Riptide
What she didn't say:I'm paying you out of my emergency escape fund because if I don't stop Blair, there won't be a bakery left to worry about anyway.
Diane had accepted. She immediately started working on inventory systems and supplier contacts while Cara handled the afternoon customers and tried not to think about the fact that she was depleting the cash she'd hidden for the day she had to run.
But maybe—just maybe—she wouldn't have to run this time.
Cara descended the stairs, pushed through the door.
The basement looked different today. Tom had rearranged his workstation, adding a second table with printouts and photographs spread across it. Wade had mounted a corkboard on one wall, red string already connecting various points—very television detective, very Wade. Reagan had brought in a proper coffee maker.
Piper sat on the floor again, surrounded by papers and her laptop, but this time she'd brought cushions, making the space more livable, and totally bohemian-teen.
"You brought food." Reagan spotted the boxes immediately. "You're my favorite person."
"Day-old, but still good." Cara set everything on the table. "Thought we might be here a while."
"Oh, yeah." Tom didn't look up from his screen. "I found some interesting stuff."
"Disturbing is more like it," Piper muttered, typing something.
Wade caught Cara's eye, gave a small nod.We've got movement. Progress.
"Okay." Cara poured herself coffee from Reagan's much better machine. "What did you find?"
Tom spun his chair around. He looked like he'd been up all night—which he probably had. "I've been digging through Blaire's financial records, cross-referencing with her Instagram posts, looking for patterns. Reagan helped me narrow down which cases to focus on."
"We concentrated on recent victims in the area," Wade added.
"And people whose situation we could verify independently," Tom said. "So we’re not walking in blind."
He pulled up a document with three names highlighted. "We found three strong candidates. All within the last eighteen months. All paid Blaire substantial amounts. All still locatable."
"Show me," Cara said.
Tom clicked on the first name. A photo appeared—middle-aged man, receding hairline, tired eyes. "Here’s our friend, Jeff Latimer, from last night. Age forty-six. Lives in Portland. Former investment banker with Morrison & Sterling—that's a big firm. Made high six figures easy."
"Former?" Cara asked.
"He's a manager at a fast-food place now." Tom pulled up more data. "Lost his job at Morrison & Sterling fourteen months ago. The same month Blaire posted about 'successfully locating' him for a client. Then the payments started."
He showed the financial records. "Seventy-five thousand dollars total paid over six months in increasingly desperate installments. Started at twenty thousand, dropped to fifteen, then ten, then smaller amounts. Like he was scraping together whatever he could."
"And now he's managing a fast-food restaurant?" Reagan's voice was grim.
"It gets worse. He lost his wife too. She got the house, the kids, everything. He's living in a studio apartment in a not-great part of Portland." Tom's expression was dark. "Blaire destroyed him."
"What did she have on him?" Wade asked.
"That's the thing. We can't figure it out." Tom pulled up more screens. "His employment record is clean. No criminalhistory. No obvious scandals. Whatever Blaire found, it's buried deep. Or it was something that didn't leave a public record."
"Could be financial fraud," Reagan suggested. "Investment bankers have access to a lot of money. Maybe he was skimming, or maybe he made some bad calls that cost clients money and covered it up."
"Or it could be personal," Wade said. "Affair, addiction, something his family didn't know about."
"Either way, he paid to keep it quiet." Cara looked at the photograph. "And lost everything anyway."
"Because Blaire didn’t stop," Tom said. "That's her pattern. Take the first payment, then come back for more. And more. Until the victim either has nothing left or?—"
"Or what?" Piper asked quietly.
