Make Me Forget - Page 150

“And you think Latimer is responsible for erecting these barriers, don’t you?”

Burt shrugged, giving her a sly look. “Actually, I suspect there might be a government agency or key contact or two who is helping him obscure his history, but yeah . . . if they are helping him in that little magic act, it’s under Latimer’s direct request.”

“You’re suggesting that government officials are helping to bury Latimer’s history in exchange for . . . what?”

Burt shrugged. “The guy’s a computer genius. Word has it he still works for the Department of Defense. He pats their back, the DOD pats his.”

“Do have any proof of that?” Harper asked.

“No, but—”

“This is all speculation,” she interrupted dismissively. “And by your own account, it’s not even fresh news about him going by a different name at one time. So Latimer has a murky history and has been known by at least two, but probably three, different names. So what?”

“Wait a second,” Burt said, holding up his hand. “I figured that since most reporters have hit a brick wall by trying to uncover anything about Latimer himself, why not delve into the next best thing? The time period when Jefferies supposedly mentored Latimer? Why not see if I could uncover any unusual incidents involving Jefferies or his property during the time when Jefferies and Latimer were supposedly thick as thieves?”

She gave him a sardonic look when he twitched his eyebrows while saying thieves. She may be enduring this, because it was her job, but the very act of talking behind Jacob’s back was making her a little nauseous, like she was doing the very activity that he’d been suspicious she’d engage in. Still . . . her curiosity pricked at her.

“Go on,” she told Burt.

“I have a good friend that I’ve known since grade school who ended up moving out east when we were in college. She just became a detective for the Charleston PD. So we got to talking the other night, and I told her about my interest in Latimer and Jefferies. She agreed to do a little digging, just between the two of us.”

“And now just between the three of us,” Harper added dryly. “Is your friend willing to go on the record about whatever she uncovered?”

“Of course not. She’d probably get fired. You know that. She’s an anonymous insider source; what’s wrong with that? The information she gave me was solid.”

“Go on.”

“So I asked Trish to look for any incident reports or arrests associated with Jefferies and his property in the time period of interest before the insider trading investigation was announced . . . say fifteen, sixteen years ago?—in that general vicinity. Well, as it turns out, there was something that happened on Jefferies’s property in the summer before Jacob Latimer officially showed up for his first semester of college at MIT, flush with cash from a certain recent windfall sale of Markham Pharmaceutical stock.”

“What was it?”

Burt opened his notebook and began to read.

“On August second, a 9-1-1 call was made by a Jacob Sinclair, age eighteen, in regard to an emergency involving the drug overdose of a twenty-year-old female by the name of Gina Morrow.” Burt glanced up when Harper’s hand jerked involuntarily on the desk, but she smoothed her face into impassivity. He continued. “The woman was reportedly found at Clint Jefferies’s summer lake house. When EMTs arrived, she was unconscious and was pretty bruised up—the report said it was from a fall while she was intoxicated. A cruiser was sent out to Jefferies’s property, as well. Jefferies himself was interviewed in the police report, although notably, Jacob Sinclair wasn’t. Jefferies claimed Sinclair had gone home, but that Sinclair didn’t really know Morrow anyway, so the police weren’t missing anything crucial. Sinclair had just found her unconscious and called 9-1-1.

“According to the police report, there was a huge party going on at the Jefferies estate that night. Despite all these people at Jefferies’s house, it seems like the police were having trouble getting anyone to give testimony about what had happened to Gina Morrow. Jefferies said that Morrow was a family friend from Charlotte, and that she had a history of drug abuse. But three other women that were interviewed said Morrow was from Charleston.”

>

“Okay,” Harper said slowly, her mind buzzing with the information. Gina Morrow and Regina Morrow had to be the same person. “He hurt her. He took advantage of her when anyone could see how vulnerable she was.” She recalled the barely repressed anger in Jacob’s voice when he’d said that about Jefferies and Regina. Had Jacob discovered Regina Morrow being abused in some way at this specific party, and rebelled against his mentor because of it? “What’s all this got to do with the insider trading scandal?” she prodded Burt.

“You sort of have to read between the lines of the police report,” Burt told her. “I don’t think this was any ordinary summer party at Jefferies’s estate. First of all, the cop noted that a lot of the guests were intoxicated, and a lot of the women were ‘young in appearance’ and ‘barely dressed.’ They put in the report that they couldn’t identify any concrete evidence of drug use at the scene.”

“But just the fact that they mention it in the report indicates they suspected it.”

“Right. Also, there’s the ages of the three women who did go on the record about this Gina Morrow.” He glanced down at his notebook. “Ages eighteen, nineteen, twenty-one . . . and Morrow was twenty.” Burt gave her a knowing glance. “Jefferies was forty-two at the time.”

“So you think Jefferies was throwing a big party involving drugs and hookers,” Harper said.

“Possibly underage ones. No working girl is going to give her age as anything but eighteen or up. But Jefferies has a big influence in that area, so the incident was kept pretty quiet, it sounds like.”

“I feel like I’m missing something. Why do you think this relates to Latimer and his purchase and sale of Markham stock?”

“Because this incident report was filed less than two weeks before Latimer bought and then sold Markham stock just as it skyrocketed on announcement of FDA approval for Zefcor, a breakthrough Markham drug for diabetes.”

Harper just stared at Burt for a moment, listening to her heart beat in her ears.

“When the SEC investigated Jefferies for insider trading, they were doing so under the assumption that Jefferies had passed on information about FDA approval to Latimer because Latimer was Jefferies’s favorite and a protégé. It hadn’t become clear at the time of the SEC’s report that there had been a falling-out between Jefferies and Latimer—or Sinclair, as Latimer was known then. A month after that big, sexy bash at Jefferies’s vacation home, Jacob had changed his name from Sinclair to Latimer, had moved to Cambridge to attend MIT, and had millions of dollars in the bank from the Markham sale,” Burt finished smugly.

Tags: Beth Kery Erotic
Source: readsnovelonline.net
readsnovelonline.net Copyright 2016 - 2024