Cruel Intent

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Authors: J. A. Jance
money aside in a separate account so she could use it if she ever decided to go ahead with breastenhancement surgery. Which she did. Once the surgery was over, I thought the account would be empty, but it’s not. It has well over a hundred thousand dollars in it—almost the exact amount that’s missing from the three cabinet deposits.”
    “You think Morgan was embezzling funds?” Ali asked.
    Bryan nodded. “That’s how it’s starting to look. I think she was hiding money away and getting ready to take off. It’s also what I need to talk to you about today. The money is in an account that’s in Morgan’s name only. With everything that’s happened, the bank says I won’t be able to touch a dime of it until after probate and this is all straightened out. High Design says they’re willing to start building the cabinets on a rush-order basis, but to do that, I need to send them money—money I don’t happen to have at the moment. I mean, I do have some money, but if I use that to pay the cabinet bill, I won’t be able to meet payroll. One way or the other, I’ll be out of business.”
    “So what do you need?” Ali asked.
    “I was hoping you’d go ahead and pay the second half of the cabinet bill. That would be enough to get them started building them. Hopefully, by the time the cabinets are ready to ship, I’ll be able to get the amount you’ve already paid freed up from Morgan’s account.”
    “You’re asking me to give you another check?”
    Bryan shook his head. “The way things stand, that’s probably a bad idea. I’d rather you have your bank wire the funds directly to High Design. That way, if something else happens…”
    “What something else?” Ali asked. “What more could go wrong?”
    Bryan let out a long breath. “Do you remember a couple of years ago, when we were afraid that fire was going to come down this side of the mountain and wipe out all of Sedona?”
    Ali hadn’t been living in Sedona at the time, but her parents had kept her posted with almost hourly reports. She nodded. “I remember the fire,” she said. “What about it?”
    “Our place was like a sitting duck out there in the middle of nowhere. Morgan did everything on the computer. I worried that if the house burned and took our computers with it, we’d be out of business. So I signed up with a Web-based off-site backup system. Every night at midnight, our computers log on to the Internet and backup all the files on our hard drives. I hadn’t ever had any reason to look at Morgan’s backup file. To begin with, I was just trying to figure out what happened to the missing money, so I didn’t look at all of them by any means, but I learned enough to know that she’s been playing me for a fool.”
    “More than just the money?”
    Bryan nodded grimly. “Way more,” he said.
    “She’s been cheating on you?”
    “In spades,” Bryan said. “I won’t know the whole story until I have a chance to look into the files. And I have a feeling that once I dig deeper, I’m going to find out there was a whole lot more going on that I still don’t know about.”
    Ali heard the hurt in Bryan’s voice. Betrayals that are uncovered while someone is still alive are bad enough, but at least you can deal with them. You can talk them over, or not, and then move on. When something like that surfaced after someone was dead, the survivor was left to deal with the whole thing alone. Unfortunately, Ali knew all about that kind of pain—from the inside out—and she worried about Bryan and whether or not he’d be able to handle whatever else might be hidden in his dead wife’s computer files.
    “I’m so sorry,” Ali said. “I’m not sure if you ever heard about it, but something very similar happened to me. There were thingsmy former husband did behind my back that I never knew about until after he was dead.”
    “When it was too late and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it,” Bryan Forester added

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