“Nah, I just got here myself.” Aidan gestured for him to follow and headed toward the deck stairs. “You heard from Cam today?”
“Not yet. He has the night shift with his mom, so usually later.”
Aidan glanced back, smirking. “You know his schedule.”
Nic pushed him down a step, and Aidan chuckled. A throat cleared from across the living area, and Nic looked up to find a reproachful Mel leaning out of what should have been the bedroom. “Lauren’s got something,” she said, then vanished back inside, muttering “children” under her breath.
“Into mobile command we go,” Nic said with a grin.
Aidan held a finger up to his lips, half shushing him, half holding back his laughter.
It was an accurate description, though. Befitting a Chief of Security for a major shipping company, and bounty hunter on the side, Mel had retrofitted the main cabin with a wall of monitors and high-speed computers, satellite connections that ran up to the roof, police band radios, and an AmSec 8000 safe, courtesy of their heist crew case. Who knew what was behind that armored door.
Even with all the gear and four people, the area was relatively spacious. “Moore’s key worked?” Nic asked Lauren, who was working at the bank of computers.
“Like a charm.” Her glittery red nails flew across the keyboard, and the screens filled with PDFs. “We’ve now got the full FBI files on your father and on Duncan Vaughn.”
Nic grabbed one of the rolling chairs and kicked the other over to Aidan. “Do I need to bring you up to speed?”
“Saved you the trouble,” Mel answered instead.
As easy as that, and Aidan was still here, still willing to help. His surprise must have shown. Sighing, Aidan clasped his forearm, squeezing. “For the last fucking time, Dominic, you’re family.”
Still hard to believe, given his limited knowledge of the same, but it was getting harder and harder to deny. And Nic didn’t want to. “All right, then,” he said with a nod. Then to Lauren, “Anything in Dad’s file we didn’t know about already?”
“There’s an outlier account. Neither Vaughn nor your father’s other lenders seem to know about it.”
“Curtis has been careful with this one,” Mel interjected. “All we’ve got so far are records of microtransactions. Small, non-triggering amounts being taken out of other accounts and deposited into this cloaked offshore one regularly.”
“How regularly?” Nic asked.
“Every month for over ten years until last April.”
Exactly when the Unknown calls had started. Because the payments had stopped?
“You’re thinking about the calls,” Mel said, as if reading his mind.
He nodded. “I have someone in Navy admin looking into them.”
“Could be related,” Mel said. “But that’s an awfully convoluted path to get five thousand to someone in North Carolina.”
“Five thousand total?” Those were microtransactions.
“Five thousand a month,” Lauren corrected.
Aidan whistled. “That’s over half a million by now.”
Not so micro, but in his dad’s investment heyday, five thousand a month was Curtis’s dining-out budget.
“For what?” Nic said. “Or for whom?” He made the least sense where Curtis was concerned. “That’s a decent-size rainy-day fund he’s kept hidden.”
“Assuming no one’s tapped it already,” Aidan said. “Do we know that yet?”
Lauren shook her head, strands coming loose from her pencil bun. “Like Mel said, it’s cloaked. We’re still trying to find it. We’ve just got the withdrawals going to the same place. We have to pull back the cloak and find the account.”
“Keep digging,” Nic said, then moved on to the more immediate problem. “What more have we learned about Vaughn?”
Lauren pinged a few keys, and FBI documents on Vaughn zoomed forward on the screens. “He’s connected to half a dozen arsons and at least two murders. Not to mention all the extortion cases he’s suspected of being involved in.”
