Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49259 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49259 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
I don’t think Jack knows the first thing about my abilities, or he wouldn’t have gotten that close. Because I make it a point not to peek into other people’s minds without an invitation, it had taken me some time to catch on, and it was his strange dealings that had alerted me to the fact that something was off, and I took a little look and hated myself for not doing it sooner.
Morally, it’s something I’d had to learn from a very young age, and I was a pro at shutting down my abilities when needed. But beyond my abilities, they had never mentioned their boss in all this time, and I never caught a thought from Jack when we were working together.
That tells me that whoever is behind them is very powerful and exerts tremendous control over the people who work for them. That, or Jack, is so good at what he does that he doesn’t leave an opening.
If he contacts this person, I have no way of knowing because the phone he uses has a tracer on it, and nothing can be found. The only other thing would be his personal computer and hers, which they tend to wipe clean after every use.
I know all these things and have collected all of this information over the last year or so, but they’re good because they do almost the same things we do when we’re trying to cover our tracks. But now we had something else to work with, thanks to my wife. Maybe this would be the smoking gun we’ve been looking for all along.
CHAPTER 15
I got to thinking on my way home that none of this made sense. Who would spend two years on a setup just to get access to business contacts? There were many venture capitalists in the world, so why Mark? Why our company?
Were they going to use him as a puppet or something like that? Was it just the money? No, knowing what I know now, I don’t think it’s about money. Maybe for Jack and Jessica, it is, but not for whoever is guiding them.
I went home and pulled out my journal with the names of all the companies and their owners that Jack had shaken down over the years. “What was the last company before ours?” I tried to see the connection, but nothing was jumping out at me.
A software company in Simi Valley is a long way removed from us, and from what I could see so far, there was no correlation to us. We had no clients in common, had never done business with that particular company, and knew no one on their executive list.
Looking at the other companies going back at least ten years, there was no way to tell how they chose their victims from that either, so I was back at square one. There has to be a pattern, something that shows how they work, but I couldn’t pinpoint it with what I had.
If what Melissa said was true, then Jack had met Trudy at rehab. But did he check himself in to meet her specifically to get to us, or was it a chance meeting? There were too many variables, and each one needed to be looked at. I forwarded the information to Cierra as promised along with a note at the end asking those very questions.
What could a pedophile ring want with a venture capitalist? Given Mark and his family own a number of businesses as well, but none of them seems to be the target. What was it they were after? Was it his reputation? His clientele? His money? What? And why was he chosen?
I sent off one more text to Cierra as a thought hit me. Since Jack had changed his name when he moved here, maybe he had used aliases elsewhere. The name Jack was on his resume to sell himself to us, but who was he all the other times? We need to find all of his aliases, but how?
As luck would have it, I saw a text exchange between the two of them that yanked me back to reality. Apparently things were taking too long, and there was no progress made on her end, so they were going to up the ante, which to me meant she was going to turn up the heat in her seduction bid.
This I can deal with. I almost wish that this was all there was to it instead of the horror that these two were involved in. As Mark's assistant, Jack is privy to his appointment schedule, so he knows where he’ll be at any given time.
I got the address of the restaurant where Mark was supposed to have a business lunch for the next day, where they were planning another sneak attack, and called up Melissa, asking her to join me and why not bring Trudy along. Even though she hates her guts, the two have been known to socialize from time to time.