Hard Tide

4. Ari

CHAPTER 4

ARI

Inside, Rennick’s lair was split in half. The left-hand side followed the same theme as downstairs, decor-wise—bland, beige, mostly empty—with a desk at the far end and a glass table surrounded by four squat stools in the middle. But the windows had been covered up, and the entire wall was decorated with handwritten letters and numbers. Mathematical graffiti. Some weird take on modern art? I thought so at first, but then I spotted the marker pens on Rennick’s desk. No, he really did use the wall as a giant whiteboard.

The right-hand side of the room still had its windows. And it also had a zen garden. Fine gravel covered a sunken floor, with three rocks at one end and a fountain burbling away in a pool at the other. Digby Rennick stood in the middle, barefoot as he raked the stones.

“Uh, hi?”

He glanced up as if my presence were somehow a surprise, then aimed a remote at the doors. Click. I was trapped.

“Ms. Danner. Thank you for coming.”

Rennick’s biography said he was forty-four, but he looked younger than me, tall and slender with the muscle tone of a desk jockey and curly brown hair two months past needing a cut. The gravel shooshed as he raked it into a complex pattern of swirls. Shoosh, shoosh, shoosh. Now I knew where Lila had gotten her penchant for long silences. Did this guy not understand that time was money? Probably not, since he had oodles of cash and his time was therefore more valuable than mine.

“Do you know how difficult it was to find the perfect rocks for this garden?” he asked.

Rocks were rocks, surely? “No?”

“A visit to Kyoto and consultation with two zen masters, plus I read the Sakuteiki in the original Japanese.”

“The Sakuteiki?”

“The first known manual of Japanese gardening. My gravel was imported from Canada. Please, sit.”

He waved toward his desk, and I hesitated because there was only one seat there—his grey leather swivel chair.

“Where?”

“The garden was designed to be viewed from a seated position behind my desk.” He waited while I gingerly took a seat. “What do you think?”

“Very…” Boring? Grey? Dry? Stony? Freaking hell, what was I meant to say? “Very inspiring.”

Rennick nodded, satisfied, and stepped out of the pit, tracking dusty footprints across the cavernous room as he headed for the meeting table. I rose and followed. Could we get to the point now? Because at this rate, I’d be late picking Haven up from school.

“Why did you ask me to come here, Mr. Rennick?”

I could’ve learned Japanese in the time it took him to reply.

“I have a problem.”

No s**t, Sherlock. “What kind of problem?”

“Somebody’s cheating the system.”

“The system? What system?”

“Are you familiar with the World Surf Tour?”

Huh? What did that have to do with anything? I might have caught a few minutes of it on TV as I channel-hopped—fools with a death wish risking shark attacks and serious injury as they careened down mountains of water protected only by their enormous egos.

“It’s a surfing contest, right?”

“It’s the surfing contest. Fifteen events, nine countries, forty-eight contestants—twenty-four men, twenty-four women—and a million bucks to the winner of each category. AnyBet is this year’s headline sponsor.”

“Congratulations?”

“My company prides itself on giving our clients the best odds, the best service, and the best betting experience. Our algorithms work in real time to protect our margins, but also to ensure that gamblers win big when it’s deserved. We don’t cheat because we don’t need to. But somebody’s cheating us.”

A surfer? “And you want me to find out who?”

“We know who. We just need you to prove it. If word got out that AnyBet had not only accepted bets on a rigged event, but also that the event was one with our name splashed all over it, our reputation would suffer. Rivals are waiting to exploit any c***k in our armour.”

“You’re gonna have to start at the beginning. Who’s cheating, and how do you know it?”

“You signed the NDA?”

“Yes, I did.”

Rennick fished the remote out of his pocket again, and a screen whirred down from the ceiling.

“Meet Zach Torres.” A picture of a blond guy appeared, the subject shirtless as he surfed toward a crowd on the beach. “Last year, he finished the tour in third place, and the year before, he came second. We first began to suspect a problem halfway through that season.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Torres was on fire. He won four events running, but during the seventh contest, the WST Teahupo’o Pro in Tahiti, we began to pick up on strange betting patterns. How familiar are you with the running of a sportsbook, Ms. Danner?”

“Honestly? I’d never thought about it before today.”

“AnyBet makes its money in two ways. Firstly, through our lounges. Clients pay a premium for the experience, and food and drink sales are extremely profitable. Secondly, we offer gambling via our online sites. We actually have seventeen different brands under the AnyBet umbrella, tailored to local markets, but they all run the same software. And that’s where we picked up the problem.”

“Go on.”

“Margins are thin in sports betting. We rely on volume. Let’s say there are ten horses in a race, some more likely to win than others. Bet a dollar on the favourite, and you might get two dollars back if it wins. Bet a dollar on an outsider, and if the other contenders fall by the final fence, you’d get a lot more. But the odds are always adjusted so that if you bet proportionally on every horse in the race, we’ll still win over time. Only four or five cents on every dollar, maybe six if we shade the lines, but we always win, and those cents add up.”

“So how can Torres cheat?”

“Because if somebody knows for certain that one of those horses isn’t going to win, it unbalances our calculations, and we lose.”

Okay, that made sense. “And Torres knows he’s not going to win, so he can, what? Bet on everybody else?”

“Exactly. And he’s trying to be clever about it. The bets on the other competitors were spread across multiple accounts covering all of our brands, but when viewed together, there was a large anomaly. I was watching the numbers, and when I saw the feed from the WST, I knew he’d throw the contest before he fell on the last run.”

“It couldn’t have been a coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in statistics and cold, hard data.”

“How much money are we talking here? How much did you lose?”

“On that particular event? Fifty thousand dollars. Same on the next. On the third contest where Torres crashed out, eighty thousand. And last week at the J-Bay Open, we lost one hundred thousand dollars. Torres is getting bolder. And richer.”

“You couldn’t just… I don’t know, not take the bets?”

“The clue is in the name—AnyBet. Any time, any place, any size. Our biggest marketing promise is that we never restrict a wager, unlike many of our competitors. Our proprietary software recalculates the odds in microseconds and ensures we make a consistent profit. We can adjust for late withdrawals, injuries, and social media stirs. The one thing we can’t factor in is cheats. But we can identify them.”

“Has this happened before?”

A long pause. “Once, several years ago. With a tennis player.”

“What happened to him?”

“Her. She retired through injury, but not before she cost us over a million dollars.”

“Is that a large percentage of your profit?”

Rennick’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t about profit; it’s about the principle. I don’t like being taken for a ride, Ms. Danner.”

My own math skills might have been basic compared to Rennick’s, but they weren’t lacking entirely.

“You said you make four to six cents on a dollar. Assuming Zach Torres works with a similar margin to yours, someone would have to bet two million bucks to make a one-hundred-thousand-dollar profit. Does Torres have that amount of cash?”

Rennick smiled for the first time. “No, he doesn’t. The investigative team has concluded he must be working with a partner.”

“Can you trace the bets?”

“When a client opens an account with us, we validate that the address exists, but when we began digging further, we found that although the addresses on the suspect accounts are all legitimate, the names used don’t match the residents. The funds are deposited from a variety of e-wallets.”

“You don’t ask for ID?”

“We do, but firstly, passports don’t show addresses. And secondly, around two years ago, we had an issue with an employee behaving inappropriately. A software engineer. We had to let him go, but unfortunately, the IS administrator didn’t revoke his remote access fast enough, and he replaced several thousand ID scans with pictures of his genitals.”

“Nice.”

“When we threatened legal action, he denied it, of course, but we were able to verify that the photos were him.”

“Dare I ask how?”

“He’d sent similar pictures to several of his female colleagues. Ultimately, we decided that the lawsuit had the potential to turn into a PR disaster, so we didn’t continue down that path.”

And brushed it under the carpet, no doubt. Wow.

“So all the ID documents are gone?”

“Not all of them. We salvaged eighty-two percent of the records, including three of the IDs in question—those belonged to a young woman working as a nurse in Florida who told us gambling is a sin, a retiree from California who claimed he didn’t own a computer or even a smartphone, and a college student who died in a car crash in Massachusetts.” Rennick sighed. “The funds in question are deposited from a variety of e-wallets.”

“And you can’t trace those either?”

“No. But interestingly, this isn’t the first time Torres’s name has been connected with illegal activity.”

“Really? What else did he do?”

“Have you heard of the Blackstone House affair? It happened eight years ago.”

Eight years ago, I’d been too busy freaking out about motherhood to keep up with the news.

“Sorry, I haven’t.”

“A woman died in his home.”

“And he was involved in her death?”

“Another man was convicted of the murder, but there were rumours of a cover-up. If Torres was involved in one serious crime, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine him taking part in another. He also spent time in jail for vehicular theft when he was younger.”

“So what do you want me to do? Investigate Torres and his network? I’ve had experience with financial crimes, and if you provide me with details of the transactions, I could look for a pattern and—”

“No, no, no. That side of the investigation is already in hand. We’ve been pursuing various methods of electronic surveillance, but we haven’t unearthed any suspicious communications.” Translation: they’d hacked Torres’s email and probably bribed an employee at the phone company. Maybe checked out his bank account too. “So we have to consider whether the arrangements are being made in person. Which means we need someone who can go undercover and get close to Zach Torres.”

Ah, s**t. Now I understood where the bikini came in.

“And you want me to be that person?”

“We need an investigator who won’t look out of place in the surf crowd, and nobody at the Twilight Agency appears to have the right attributes.”

Twilight? Double s**t.

“The Twilight Agency is working on this case too?”

“We keep them on retainer.”

I nearly walked out right then. Many times over the next several months, I’d come to wish I’d done exactly that. But I was desperate, okay? Desperate for rent money, and also determined to cling onto the job I’d once loved so much.

“Does Torres live in Las Vegas? I mean, there isn’t exactly much surf here.”

“He lives in Santa Cruz.”

“So you want me to…?”

“Travel to California? Yes. Lila informs me that you’re licensed there.”

Indeed I was. Morty had insisted upon it. Since Clark County butted up against the California and Arizona borders and the licensing requirements were less rigorous in those two states than in Nevada, it had made sense to obtain the additional credentials in case a project spilled over state lines. But Santa Cruz was five hundred miles away, and I had a daughter.

“That’d get awful expensive. You haven’t considered hiring somebody from the West Coast instead?”

“Lila found me two girls. The first used a twenty-year-old photo on her website, and the second must’ve put on eighty pounds since her promo shots were taken. But you… How many cases have you solved in the past?”

“As in an actual number?”

“I’m a numbers man.”

“For the first six months, I was learning the ropes, and I cleared my first solo case at the age of twenty. For the next six years, I probably averaged one a month. Tricky problems like murders usually take more legwork than, say, ferreting out a dishonest employee.”

“So, seventy-two cases?”

“Something like that. Plus all the usual surveillance and background checks and things that weren’t actual cases as such.”

“And that makes you twenty-six?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You haven’t solved anything in the last year?”

“My partner died, and I took a new job that didn’t work out.” Had Jankowski told him I’d worked at Twilight? Clearly not, or I wouldn’t be here. “Now I’m starting out on my own.”

“Died?” Rennick shook his head. “Inconvenient. I could have hired him to assist.”

Inconvenient? The man had the empathy of a razor blade. But if Rennick was seeking additional help, did that mean Twilight’s investigation wasn’t going so well?

“It was a difficult time.”

“When can you start?”

“I haven’t said yet that I’ll take the job.”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Why wouldn’t I? Because my whole life was in Nevada—Haven, Nana, our crappy apartment. And I didn’t even own a bikini. Why? Because I didn’t much like water. Okay, I hated it. Ever since I fell into a lake as a child and nearly drowned, I’d kept my feet firmly on dry land. Plus I’d have to report to Jankowski, and I’d rather crawl over a mountain of shattered glass than speak to that prick again.

But on the other hand, I really, really needed money, and Rennick had plenty of it. Investigative work paid a hell of a lot more than waitressing, plus the odds of a disgruntled customer throwing a bottle of sauce at me were considerably lower. And if I broke a case for one of Las Vegas’s wealthiest businessmen, that could lead to more clients, not to mention the satisfaction I’d get from succeeding where Jankowski had failed.

“You’re talking about long-term surveillance. That’s time consuming.”

“And you have a heavy workload right now?”

“No, but—”

“You don’t think you’re up to it? Posing as a surfer chick?”

“Of course I am. Ocean’s my middle name.”

“Are you being flippant?”

“No, my middle name really is Ocean. My father was a sailor.”

According to the court paperwork, his yacht had been seized after he was convicted. The cops found almost three million dollars’ worth of drugs stashed on board. And as for “Arizona,” that had been my mother’s idea—according to Nana, she had a weird obsession with Stevie Nicks, who was born in Phoenix.

For a moment, Rennick’s mask softened. “My father was English. He named me after the village he grew up in.”

Was English? “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It was a long time ago. What are your rates?”

“Fifty bucks an hour, plus expenses.”

Not quite bargain basement, but halfway down the stairs.

“Forty,” Rennick countered. I opened my mouth to object, but he held up a hand. “Hear me out. If the case gets wrapped up by the end of this year’s tour, I’ll pay a fifty percent bonus.”

Sixty bucks an hour? Even when I worked for Morty Coulson, I’d never made that much. Jankowski had charged me out at a hundred and twenty, but I only saw a fraction of that amount. A bonus would pay for the horse-riding lessons Haven had always wanted to take, and I could treat Nana too.

“How long is the tour?”

“Eight or nine months total. Possibly ten—it all depends on when the swell’s right for the big-wave contests. They’re the finale. The competitors are just coming off their mid-season break, so there are five or six months left to go.”

Five or six months?

Ouch.

But I couldn’t afford to pass this job up, even though I’d be separated from my family for longer than ever before.

“I’d need to stay in California the whole time? The expenses would be substantial.”

“You’ll be based in California, but you’ll need to follow the tour as necessary. Send Lila the contract, and I’ll sign it.”

“I’m not sure my licence allows me to operate overseas.”

Actually, I was sure; it didn’t.

“Are you intending to get caught?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Lila will also give you the files we have so far and provide administrative support. We’ll need regular progress reports by email, every other day at least.”

Digby Rennick might have been whiter than white when it came to his customers, but with that little exchange, he’d revealed that behind the scenes, his moral code was shadowed with shades of grey. I found that oddly comforting. At least he wasn’t trying to hide his true nature. And if I could email the reports, then I wouldn’t need to speak to my pig of an ex-boss.

“Twice a week. Otherwise I’ll spend too much time writing and not enough time doing.”

“Twice a week, plus immediate notification of any important developments.”

“Agreed.”

This could be the most lucrative case of my life, and one that had the potential to get my stalled career back on track. But it also promised to be the most challenging. I’d be on my own, my only backup an executive assistant who looked at me as if I were something to scrape off her shoe and a man whose testicles were intimately acquainted with my knee. And that was only half of the problem. I glanced up at Zach Torres, still frozen mid-wave. How the hell was I meant to get anywhere near him?

“Lila will show you out.”

Rennick rose gracefully and padded back to his zen garden, our conversation over.

I’d lost my freaking mind.