72. SARA

One more sleepless night like the last two and I think I might just go insane.

I spent the $500 Tre gave me on food and a hotel room that was a step up from the Rest-All Motel, but still several steps below the Presidential Suite at the Sapphire. I was tired of extremes – I just wanted something normal for a night.

Grace offered to vacate my apartment so I could stay there, but I declined. I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts for one single night. In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, since it just gave me an endless amount of time to feed my own worries.

“Ms. Bishop,” Pearce’s secretary says, drawing me out of my thoughts. “Mr. Pearce will see you now.”

I almost ask her how the diarrhea is going as I pass her desk, before realizing that’s just my exhausted brain rambling.

“Sara!” Quentin says with more warmth than I’ve ever seen. “Good to see you. Please, sit down.”

I all but collapse onto the elegant sofa. His office is very well-appointed. It lets people know that he’s got a lot of money, which in turn means he can make them a lot of money. Everyone around me seems to have money on their minds these days.

“I trust the cashier’s check cleared and your company’s accounts are fatter this morning?” he asks.

Case in point.

“Yes,” I say wearily. “Is that all you wanted me here for?”

His grin makes my skin crawl.

“You could say thank you,” he says in a “just kidding” tone.

“Why? Because you fulfilled your end of our contract? Fine, I’ll say thanks.” I put on a Pollyanna grin. “Thanks for paying my fee, Quentin! You’re awesome!”

He frowns. So much for his attempt to act like a normal human being.

“I could give two shits about money right now,” I say. “If you don’t have anything else to discuss, I’ll be going. Thanks for wasting my time.”

“That’s interesting,” he says evenly, despite my taunts. “I would have thought money would be foremost on your mind right now.”

“And why is that?”

“You’re married to Chance Talbot,” he shrugs. “When you divorce him, you’re legally entitled to half his shares in Atlas. I doubt he had time to arrange a prenuptial agreement before your hasty wedding.”

That thought never entered my head, but now that it’s there, it’s hard to ignore. I really don’t care about money, but we’re talking potentially hundreds of millions of dollars here. That could do a lot of good.

But it would also hand over even more control to Pearce.

“You asked me here to talk me into selling,” I say. “Because you think I’m going to divorce Chance. That’s a mighty big assumption, Quentin, even for you.”

Another cold smile. “I never would have taken you for a prison bride, Sara. But I guess to each their own.”

What the hell is he talking about?

“Prison bride?” I say. “How do you figure?”

“I know Chance broke into my home office and found out about my connection to Nova Chemicals,” he says. “Once he found that, he would have realized that Sebastian Dacosta was the one who supplied the incriminating intelligence my partners and I have been trying to confirm.

“I’ll tell you what I told the rest of the board, just in case you haven’t figured it out yet: Patrick Sullivan embezzled money from a CIA operation while in Iraq and used it to fund the expansion of Atlas. Chance found out about it and blackmailed him into raising him up in the company. Sullivan knew that if the information came to light, the company – and his family – would be ruined.”

I shake my head. Chance told me they stole that money form a terrorist financier. This story isn’t true – is it? I don’t have any evidence either way. It comes down to which one I believe.

“You’re wrong,” I say. “Chance would never do that.”

“I’m sure you didn’t think he was capable of murder, either. Try to convince Sebastian Dacosta of that.”

My head is spinning with all this. And underneath it all is an itch at the back of my head that won’t fully solidify. Something Pearce said doesn’t add up, but I can’t think of it consciously. The harder I try, the further it slips away.

“Let’s say I do divorce him and sell my shares,” I say. “That would leave you with all of the stock, except for what Chance has left.”

“And the courts would likely force him to divest himself of them after a conviction. It’ll just take a little time.”

“But then aren’t you left holding the bag? It will eventually come out that Atlas was started with stolen CIA money. Why would you and your partners, whoever the hell they are, want to own a tainted company?”

He grins again. “The US government needs Atlas,” he says. “So do many other governments around the world. They’re not going to want to see it go down in flames. And when the new owners generously offer to compensate the CIA for their losses, they’ll be seen as heroes as well as good corporate citizens, making up for the previous owners’ sins. Politicians will be lining up to be invited to the Atlas golf tournament.”

I hate to admit it, but he’s not wrong. The stain will be on the Sullivans, not the new owners. Sully and Chance were the ones behind everything. With Sully gone, that leaves his family and Chance to take the fall.

Do I want to be a part of any of this? Selling to Quentin feels so slimy, like a betrayal of Chance. But do I want to get dragged through the mud along with him?

God, I wish I’d never met Sebastian Dacosta!

Pearce’s phone starts to ring. He glances at the screen and smiles.

“My contact in the Department of Defense,” he says, tapping the answer button. “Maybe he has some good news.”

As he talks, the itch in my brain gets stronger. Something doesn’t add up here, but what is it? And what just made it itchier? Something he said. Come on, Sara, you’re an investigator – think like one! What was the trigger?

I wish I’d never met Sebastian Dacosta.

Wait a minute…

I know Chance broke into my home office … he would have realized that Sebastian Dacosta was the one behind the incriminating intelligence…

Suddenly it’s right there in front of me: Chance didn’t know Dacosta had anything to do with Nova Chemicals until I told him. Up to that point, it was just a company, not a person.

He recognized the name but not the connection. It existed, but he needed someone to point it out to him. And what are the odds that the one person who had incriminating information on Atlas just happened to be a recent client of mine?

About as high as the odds of Quentin Pearce randomly choosing my name because it was first in the phone book. How stupid could I be?

It was right in front of me the whole fucking time.