Page 38 of The Billionaire's Special Relationship

“Good evening, sir. What can I do for you?”

Stuart looked at Tabby. “What’s your favorite meal?”

“That’s easy. It’s always spaghetti. But with meat sauce, not meatballs.”

“You heard that?”

“I did, sir.”

“Add salad and garlic bread,” Stuart said,the chef acknowledged the order, and then the call ended.

Tabby had to ask. “A chef lives in your apartment?”

“He has an apartment downstairs, but he’s on-call twenty-four-seven.”

“For the whole building?”

“Oh no,” said Mel. “There was two chefs for the whole building. Francois only services the penthouse and a few other similarly-situated residents. Which means,” Mel added, “that Francois services only the billionaires who own apartments in this building. All the other wealthy families, the millionaires, are forced to share the other chef.”

JK laughed. “Must be nice,” he said as his team chuckled too.

Although Tabby laughed too, Stuart could tell that the very thought of that “b” word was a shock to her system. He had every intention of discussing his lifestyle with her at breakfast earlier that morning, but the Feds ruined that plan.

But JK wasn’t there for the fun of it. He had a job to do. He leaned forward. “Now please, by all means young lady, tell us about this proof you said you have.”

Tabby took a moment to compose herself. Especially with everybody’s eyes on her now. But she was confident in what she had. “After the FBI told me that a ticket-taker in a parking garage here in New York saw Stuart come in and then leave in a hurry aftershots were fired, and that it all happened around ten last night, I knew that couldn’t be right.”

“It can’t be right because I was in Larkin last night,” Stuart said.

“But the problem is that the crime took place around ten,” said JK. “Because according to that motel’s check-in log, and we have guys on the ground who checked this out thoroughly, Stuart checked in around seven-thirty last night. That meant he would have had two-and-a-half hours to fly to New York, commit the crime, and then fly back to Larkin. Which is technically possible since it only takes an hour by plane from Larkin to New York.”

“But there’s no record of me flying out of Larkin last night,” said Stuart. “Did the investigators confirm that too?”

JK shook his head. “They couldn’t confirm it, no.”

Stuart frowned. “Why the hell not, JK?”

“It’s not as if that tiny airfield in Larkin is like LaGuardia or JFK. Most of the people flying out of that place are flying crop dusters or some little helicopter, and they don’t bother to keep records of takeoffs and landings. They don’t have the personnel to do it. It’s a very rural airfield.”

“Then if that’s the case,” Mel said to Tabby, “what kind of evidence could you have that our investigators couldn’t find?”

Tabby pulled a flash drive out of her pocket. “Alvin was gonna upload it to my phone,” she said, “but my phone fell in a big puddle of water and stopped working.”

“No wonder I couldn’t reach you by phone,” Stuart said. “And when I ordered my guys on the ground to go to that motel and then to your home and bring you here, they couldn’t find you at either location.”

“As soon as I got this evidence,” Tabby said, “I drove straight to New York.”

“But what evidence is what I’m asking?” Mel was getting impatient. “You keep saying you have evidence, but you won’t tell us what. What’s on that flash drive?”

“I have video that shows the time we checked in, the time we walked into our motel room, and how we stayed in that room all night until the next morning when the FBI showed up. I was so out of it the night those punks broke into my house that I thought we checked into that motel around nine rather than seven-thirty. I thought all I would need was a video showing the time we checked in. But when I saw the tape and realized we checked in at seven-thirty rather than at nine, I asked Alvin to show me more video of our motel room door to prove we stayed put all night until the next morning. And he got it for me.”

“Wait a minute,” JK said. “Something’s not right. How could you have a video showing all of that, young lady, when the security guard, who’s in charge of the video, told our guys that the cameras weren’t working that night? He claimed there was no video to see. And sure enough, when our security team went to that motel and pulled it up, all video ofthat night was missing. All of it. It could have been wiped, sure, but the fact remains it wasn’t there.”

“He must have scrubbed it after I got a copy,” said Tabby.

“But why?”

“Somebody could have paid him to wipe it clean before our guys got there,” said Mel.