Total pages in book: 29
Estimated words: 26659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 107(@250wpm)___ 89(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 26659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 107(@250wpm)___ 89(@300wpm)
When Harry reached us thirty minutes later, we’d already found a ton of shit that hadn’t been visible when his guys had done their searches. In fact, we’d found accounts with over fifty million dollars spread across them.
Pacing back and forth, Harry rubbed the back of his neck while Laura tapped away on the keyboard of her laptop, stopping to read the screen and mutter periodically.
“Part of me wants just to take it all and hide it from him so he freaks out, but a bigger part of me wants him to pay for his crimes.”
Laura looked up from her screen. “Why can’t we do both?”
Eva peered over her sister’s shoulder and looked at what was on her laptop, squinting and shaking her head. “I don’t understand what any of that means, but I’m intrigued about how we can make both happen to him.”
“Well,” Laura said slowly, cracking her knuckles and stretching her neck from side to side, “I can remove James’ money from Tyson’s accounts and make the transactions disappear like the money had never been there. That’ll leave thirty million for the authorities to work with.”
“Yeah, but how do we get that information to them? The accounts are in fake names, and it’s not like we can admit how we found them,” Harry ground out as he finally took a seat.
“Jeez, are you an amateur? We put the accounts into his name, erase the changes on them and make it look like that’s the name they were opened with, then we send an anonymous tip-off to the IRS and FBI.”
Harry looked unimpressed. “They can track even anonymous tip-offs, smart ass. This is the government we’re talking about, not a housewife sitting reading an email.”
“Well, smartass,” she shot back acerbically. “I can make my location and IP address completely untraceable, exactly like I’ll do as I go into these banks’ records to find this money for your ungrateful ass.”
Eva looked like she wanted to laugh while her sister looked like she wanted to gut Harry.
Seeing my best friend narrowing his eyes and knowing his personality, I stepped in before it could get more heated. “Okay, let’s do it. Skim from the accounts until James has his money back, then we’ll submit the whistleblowing tips to them. If they do manage to trace them, I’ll explain that I found and submitted the details to them after I got a call from someone who knew him. We’ll send the tip-offs from my office.”
Laura considered this and then reached into her bag and pulled out a small white box. “No need, I’ll just use this portable router. It’s a prepaid one, so if they do manage to achieve the impossible and find out where they came from, it’ll come from this.”
“Isn’t that in your name, though?” Harry asked.
“Nope. I bought it from an auction with stuff from a pawn store whose owner was charged with selling stolen goods. When I checked the details on it, his were on there, so maybe it’ll serve as karma for being a dick?”
Not looking convinced, Harry rolled his eyes. “Bit much for just selling stolen goods, isn’t it?”
Laura looked at him coolly. “Not when he was paying assholes to rob vulnerable and old people to get him shit to sell, it’s not.”
I saw Harry back down for the first time and had to hold back my smile. “Fair enough.”
So, that’s how we did it. We skimmed twenty million, an astronomical amount to ‘skim’ usually, putting all of the money into the Owens Construction business account Harry had the details for. After that, Laura erased the transactions and altered the history of the reports so that it looked like it’d never existed in them. She then changed the account details to show both Tyson Randall and Roy Green as the ones they were opened in and went a step further and changed the addresses to his home one.
Finally done with it all, she gathered what she needed and sent the tips into the whistleblower sections.
“Let me just find a couple of things before I wrap this up,” she muttered as she typed. “Ah, here it is.”
“Who are you emailing?” Eva asked as she frowned at the screen.
“I looked up the head of the whistleblowing department for the IRS and the head of the financial fraud team in the FBI. I’m emailing them the details directly.” With one final tap of her keyboard, she sat back and smiled at us all. “Done. I didn’t want it to get held up in a general mailbox where it could potentially be overlooked.”
“Damn,” I whistled, “good idea.”
Eva looked worried. “What if he finds out and changes the address on the accounts again?”
“I’ll just keep changing it back. I’ve already changed the security so he can’t get into them as well as the date of birth, but if he actually goes into the bank or contacts them about it, he’ll have to jump over some hurdles to prove his identity. In case he gets his buddy to hack them, I’ve installed a safeguard that’ll kick him out of the accounts and notify me of any attempts so I can be waiting.”