Page 77

Jenny shook her head.

“What happened?”

Brax and Gideon came back into the room.

“It was nothing,” Jenny whispered. “I’m more interested in what you and Gideon found out.”

“What was nothing?” Brax asked.

Damn, the man didn’t miss a thing.

“Just girl talk. Shopping. You wouldn’t be interested,” Jenny said quickly. Brax gave her a long look, but let it go. She knew he was going to circle back later.

Shit.

Gideon sat down next to Jada, and he turned over his tablet. He pulled up some information, then turned it around so that she and Brax could see his screen.

“Jenny, who is Fiona?” Gideon asked.

She frowned. “Fiona? What does she have to do with anything?”

“Can you just tell us?” Jada asked in a calm voice. “We found something in the Vice President of HR’s email, where he mentioned the name Fiona and your name, Jennifer Rivers. He’d deleted the email, but didn’t bother to empty his trash.”

“What did the email say?” Jenny asked.

“Baby, first tell them about Fiona. Isn’t she a friend of yours?” Brax asked.

She looked over at him and nodded. “Yes, she is.” She turned back to Gideon and Jada. “Fiona Richards is someone who started out as a temp in our London office while I was working there. She eventually ended up as the executive assistant to the Director of Operations and the Director of Finance. Normally there was one EA for the five Directors in the C-Suite, but she’d gone out on maternity leave. So, they had to get two temps, Fiona and Angela.”

“I got her personnel file,” Gideon said.

“Yeah, and I went over it with a fine-tooth comb,” Jada nodded. “It was slim, because she was a temp. It says that the two directors she reported to were considering hiring her on in a fulltime capacity, but one day her temp agency called them and said she wasn’t going to return. It was a black eye on the temp agency, and the two directors were pissed. The agency lost their contract with Cyber Tech. It was weird. Gideon and I looked everywhere through the HR records to see if she had reported some kind of harassment that might have been a reason for her to leave, but there was nothing.”

“I hacked PeopleNow, her agency, and there is no record of a Fiona Richards ever having worked there. None. What’s even more interesting is that so far, we’ve been unable to track down Fiona anywhere in London. Three weeks after her disappearance, you were transferred to Bangladesh. Can you tell us why this might have happened?”

“I had put in my request for a new assignment two months before Fiona quit. I don’t think that the two things are related. As for Fiona and my name being linked by the VP of HR here in the States, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“But you know something about her disappearance, don’t you,” Jada prompted.

Jenny nodded. “She was in an untenable situation. It was worse than sexual harassment if you could believe it.”

“What was it, Honey?” Brax asked as he put his arm around her shoulders.

“Fiona was pretty. Actually she was…is beautiful. Curves in all the right places. Blonde. She loves to wear these vintage suits to the office, that really show off all of her assets. She gets them from secondhand shops, so they’re cheap, and she looked great in them. I think Dave chose her as their EA because of how she looked, and Edgar chose her because he thought she was stupid.”

“Was she?” Brax asked.

“Fiona couldn’t put down that she had a degree, because she didn’t, but she was taking night classes, and only had one more class to take to get her degree in mathematics. It was actuarial mathematics.”

Gideon whistled. “She could probably run circles on the Finance Director,” Gideon chuckled.

“That was the problem. Six months into her gig, she realized that he was moving money around into a shell corporation. What’s worse, he had opened it up in her name.”

“How in the hell had he done that?” Jada demanded to know. “She should have been smarter than that.”

“Fiona and I pieced it together later on. Edgar supposedly broke his foot the first month she started, and couldn’t come into the office for four weeks. There were small things that needed to be signed and notarized, that he authorized her to do on his behalf. He’d say he’d read it over at home, and she’d print it out and sign it in front of the notary. Easy.”

Jada groaned. “She might have been school smart, but not street smart. He ate her for lunch.”