The Lies I Tell(22)

In the background I could hear announcements over the loudspeaker and the dull roar of voices. “Hold on,” he said. “Let me go somewhere a little quieter.” The sounds receded a little bit. “Okay, what did you say?”

“The bank card,” I repeated. “It won’t work.”

Irritation flooded his voice. “Can you wait to use it?”

“I had a cart full of groceries and an angry line of people behind me while the checker voided my entire order.” I lowered my voice, concerned. “If something is going on with your account, you don’t want to ignore it. A lot of damage can be done in a few hours. This happened to me one time and it turned out a guy in Florida had my account information and he was buying sex toys off the internet with it. It was a nightmare to unravel.”

“Jesus. I can’t deal with this right now.”

“I came home and tried calling the bank myself, but they won’t let me do anything without a password.”

“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s Shazaam. Capital S. Two A’s.”

“It’ll be sorted by the time you get home.”

I went into Cory’s office and sat at his desk, the bank’s website already pulled up on the computer. In thirty seconds, I was in.

I spent a few minutes looking around. The mortgage posted yesterday, with a few more automatic payments to the utility company and cable. I navigated over to Daily Cash Withdrawal Limit and saw it set at $500. I clicked on the field and entered the maximum, $2,500.

Later that night, after he’d finished telling me about the success of the tournament, we circled back to the bank issue. “What was the problem?” he asked.

“Too many charges posted on the same day,” I told him. I handed him a piece of paper with notes I’d created. “After I got the plants for the backyard, I was too close to the daily limit to cover the groceries. I spoke to someone named Amanda and wrote down her employee number so you can speak to her yourself if you want. She said you needed to increase your limit to avoid this happening in the future, which we did.” I shook my head. “I spent about an hour on hold waiting to speak to someone. The problem itself only took ten minutes to actually fix.”

“I saw the email. Thanks for taking care of it.”

“If you had a smartphone, you could have done it yourself in about five minutes.”

“That would have been five minutes I didn’t have to spare. Besides,” he said, “I don’t want to be tied to my email twenty-four hours a day.”

I poured more wine into his nearly empty glass and smiled at him. “Amen to that.”

***

On a Saturday morning a few weeks later, while Cory was out for his morning run, I returned to the Chase website and finished up. I logged in quickly, toggled over to the notifications page, and changed his notifications from email to text. Then I entered my cell number. I saved the changes and logged out.

Cory’s email pinged with an email alerting him of the changes to his account. I moved it to the trash and then deleted it from there, removing all traces of it. The entire process took less than a minute.

I went into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee, and stared out the window. Dew still covered the grass in a silvery layer, the sun just beginning to peek over the top of the houses across the street. One of my mother’s rules popped into my head: Two women working together are a force to be reckoned with.

I wasn’t exactly working with Kristen, but I was certainly here because of her, finishing what she started. Making sure the end of her story with Cory was a good one.





Kat


The phone call came through to my desk while Frank was at lunch.

“I need to speak to the reporter working on the Cory Dempsey story.” It was a woman.

“He’s at lunch, but I’m happy to help.”

She hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue, so I said, “I can assure you, what you tell me will stay confidential.”

“You need to talk to Cory Dempsey’s best friend, Nate Burgess.”

I recognized the name, and I knew that, so far, he’d been stonewalling Frank’s attempts to interview him. “Why? What is it you think he can tell us?”

“All the questions people have—how many girls there were, how often, where Cory found them—Nate knows all of it.”

“Have you told the police?” I asked.

“I’m telling you. Talk to Nate, and he’ll be able to fill in all the gaps.”

“How did you come to have this information?”

“Let’s just say that for the past seven months, I’ve had a front row seat to how Cory and Nate work.”

It was that statement that caught my attention. I reached for my notes and flipped through the pages until I found the conversation between Cory Dempsey’s cousins. He said she came out of nowhere seven months ago, infiltrated his life, and conned Cory into giving her access to everything.

“And what makes you think Nate will talk to us?” I asked.

“He won’t if he thinks you’re a reporter. But you can find him eating lunch every day at Millie’s Tap Room on Culver Boulevard. He’s always there by one and sits at the bar. Right under the television. He talks a big game after a couple drinks.”