The Infamous Frankie Lorde 1, page 17
Miles’s fingerprint.
A little black recorder.
I picked up the recorder and turned the volume as low as I could get it before holding it up to my ear. When I pressed Play, the voices began to flow out immediately and I smiled.
“You should really consider starting your own foundation, you know?” My voice came out strong and slightly flirty. “The Christian Miles Foundation, maybe? I could be your first supporter.”
“I like that. The Christian Miles Foundation,” Miles’s voice responded loud and clear.
I pressed Rewind and played it again.
“I like that. The—”
I pressed Pause and laid the recorder back down on the desk next to the other items.
Now I was ready.
Reaching up under Miles’s desk, I found the button that opened the control panel and pressed it.
A quiet whirring filled the room as the desk spread apart to reveal the speaker and tiny square of black glass.
Almost immediately, the computerized British woman’s voice called out, “Prepare voice recognition and fingerprint scan.”
The sound was louder than I remembered it being. Then again, there was far more at stake tonight than there had been the first time I’d been in Miles’s office.
I froze in place and looked at the door for some sign that Miles’s security detail was going to burst in at any moment. But all was quiet.
At least for now.
As the British computer lady began to talk again, I pulled the recorder over and pressed Play as I held it down to the speaker.
“Christian Miles.”
Miles’s voice rang out of the recorder and I paused it before it could continue.
“Voice recognition accepted,” the British woman said. “Commence fingerprint scan now.”
“Shhhh,” I begged the recording as she bellowed out her commands.
I took the latex glove, positioned Miles’s taped print on the thumb, and placed them down on the square glass.
“Fingerprint not recognized,” the British computer’s voice called out.
Oh, no.
My stomach dropped.
Swallowing hard, I picked the glove up and straightened it before placing it back on the scanner over the taped print.
“Fingerprint not recognized,” the British computer lady repeated.
“Come on, come on, come on!” I whispered, picking the glove up one last time and forcing the finger more into a thumb shape before placing it lightly on the glass below.
And then I held my breath and waited.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
“Fingerprint accepted,” the British computer finally chirped out into the darkness as more whirring began and the desk began to move underneath my hands.
My adrenaline began to surge as I watched the floor open up and reveal a tiny staircase leading down into darkness. When the desk finally stopped moving, I grabbed my tools and began to walk slowly down the steps, only the penlight lighting my way.
I shivered as I began to descend. It was colder down here. Like walking into a basement. Only, I could feel that it was air conditioning that was regulating the temperature and not that I was in some dank, dark cave. That at least gave me some comfort. Because usually, walking down into dark, hidden places isn’t my idea of a good time.
And for all I knew, I could be walking into Miles’s super-creepy, super-secret dungeon. The one where he literally kept all his skeletons.
At this thought, I hesitated, wondering for the first time if this was a good idea.
But then lights began to flash on around me, illuminating the darkness and showcasing a clean, sleek room.
“Not bad,” I said, looking around Miles’s hidden treasure room in awe.
As I walked toward the middle of the space, I heard the desk in the office above begin to slide back into place. Most people would probably freak at the thought of being locked in a room they weren’t yet sure how to get out of, but at this particular moment, I didn’t care. If there was a way in, there was a way out. And for now, I definitely wanted to be in here.
Because this was where Miles was hiding his most valuable loot.
He’d divided the room up into sections, sort of like his own mini museum. On one wall he’d hung several pieces of art. As I got close to them, I could read the golden plaques affixed to the frames.
HENRI MATISSE
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
PAUL CÉZANNE
JACKSON POLLOCK
All the greats were there. The question was, why? Most art collectors display their purchases where anyone can see them, eager to show off both their supposed good taste and their abundant wealth.
But these? These were hidden away where only Miles could enjoy them.
I studied the painting closest to me. It looked like a watercolor of a countryside, lush green hills surrounding some sort of building or cluster of houses. It was perfectly nice, but nothing special if you asked me.
The plaque read View of Auvers-sur-Oise by Paul Cézanne.
Curious why it had made it into Miles’s hidden room, I Googled the title from the burner phone and very quickly found out why.
The painting in front of me was stolen. Presumed to be taken from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, back in 1999 during a celebration of fireworks put on the night before the millennium.
Its estimated worth? Ten million dollars.
Quick searches of the other paintings hanging on Miles’s wall showed the same situation. All extremely valuable. All extremely stolen or presumed missing.
I shook my head.
There’s a reason thieves don’t steal famous art. And this was it. Most thieves steal with the ultimate goal of making money. Sure, sometimes it’s for fun, or for the challenge of taking the unattainable. But that’s not what keeps us going.
What keeps us going is money.
And that means that whatever we steal, we have to be able to resell.
Famous art is nearly impossible to resell.
This is because the people who really want it—the ones who would pay an insane amount of money to own a piece—want to display it. Whether it’s in a museum or a personal gallery in their home, the reason a person would spend $50 million on a van Gogh is to show it off.
And if it’s stolen? Well, you can’t exactly brag about that. Or, you could, but you’d get caught and the painting would go back to whoever it belonged to anyway, so what’s the point?
I had no idea why Miles would have stolen art. It didn’t make any sense, but then again a lot of what he did didn’t make sense to me. One thing was sure, though…I wouldn’t be leaving here with any of it.
Same went for the statues and sculptures he had placed around the room. After looking one up and finding that it had been mysteriously taken from its owner over a century before, I decided those were lost causes too.
I was beginning to think I’d have to walk away from Miles’s treasure room with nothing to help the people he’d swindled at the apartment complex he owned. And the thought was more than disappointing.
It was downright unacceptable.
There had to be something down there that I could take and turn into money for those who’d been cheated by Miles.
There just had to be.
That’s when I remembered it. The money that was supposedly hidden on Miles’s property. What better place to hide it than in this secret, locked room?
I began to pull pictures away from the wall and other stuff down off its hinges.
And there, behind an ugly framed photo of Christian Miles and President Trump, was the outside of a safe.
Entry Thirty-Six
“Jackpot,” I whispered, rubbing my hands together excitedly.
The safe wasn’t anything special. Just your regular, run-of-the-mill wall safe. Certainly not one that could keep a seasoned thief like me out.
In fact, getting it open was going to be pretty simple.
People don’t realize how easy it is to open most safes.
Of course, the ones in banks or museums or casinos are much more state-of-the-art. They have fail-safes upon fail-safes, multiple alarms, shutdown mechanisms—you name it, those kinds of places have them.
But home safes? Well, in thieves’ circles, they’re known as expensive cabinets. Might as well leave them wide open for as much as they do to keep people like me and my dad out.
Still, I appreciate the fact that rich people believe safes are enough to keep their valuables safe.
It makes my job easier.
Digging into another hidden pocket that Ollie had somehow managed to sew into my costume, I pulled out a small velvet drawstring bag. Inside was a wooden box about the size of a jewelry store bracelet container. I opened it up, pulled out a round, hockey-puck-sized magnet, and held it up in the light.
It was a rare-earth magnet, and it’s been part of my tool kit for more than five years now. It was actually one of the first pieces Dad gave me and has come in handy more often than you’d expect a magnet to.
Because a rare-earth magnet like the one I was holding can open pretty much anything. A hotel room. An apartment complex. An unmarked entrance leading into a military bunker.
And especially a safe.
I slipped the magnet into an old tube sock and took it over to the safe. Then, slowly placing it against the front surface, I moved it around until the magnet found the nickel piece inside the safe. Once I felt the connection, I simply dragged the magnet to the left and pulled down on the lever to open it.
“Easy peasy,” I said with a smile as I let the door swing wide.
And then I looked inside.
In all the articles I’d read about Miles and his secret treasure room, it had been rumored that he kept up to a million dollars in a secret safe somewhere on the property.
All these articles had been wrong.
Because I could see that there was way more than a million in there. It was probably more like three to four times that amount, actually.
And it was all there for the taking.
Grabbing one of the closest stacks, I fanned through it like a deck of cards, estimating that there were fifty bills in each stack. And each of the bills was marked with a great big green 100 on it.
“Holy—” I started to say as I worked out in my head just how much money I was looking at.
Then I promptly began to pull out stacks upon stacks of the money, until the floor at my feet was covered. I thought briefly about what it would be like to take the bundles apart and throw them into the air while watching the money fall down around me. But the point was to leave the place looking like I’d never been there.
No, I would have to make it rain later.
Instead, I lifted up the side of my dress, revealing a hole in the seam near the waist, and began shoving the stacks inside.
This was the actual genius of the outfit. Ollie had built this whole area underneath the skirt where I could hide just about anything. As soon as I dropped it into the hole in the seam, the item—in this case, a stack of five grand—would fall down into the sacklike structure built around the crinoline.
It was kind of incredible if you thought about it. The pouf of the raven’s tail made it impossible to see that I had anything hidden under there. Which meant I would be able to sneak out of the party completely undetected.
But just to be clear, I didn’t take it all.
I didn’t really need to, and the smarter thing would be to leave at least half of it so that it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable that the money had been stolen.
The most successful robberies are the ones that nobody ever finds out about. And that means no cops to come looking for you.
So when I was finished grabbing the amount I wanted, I pulled the cash that was in the back toward the front, pried the magnet from the safe, and closed it, hearing it lock back up on its own.
I could’ve left right then. And maybe I should’ve. I’d gotten more than what I’d gone there for and the rest of the stuff would’ve been impossible to resell on any market.
But something held me back.
Something inside me was screaming that there was more in there for me. Something that was worth more than anything I’d already found. Call it a hunch. Or maybe some weird intuition.
But I’d learned to trust my gut. And my gut was telling me not to leave just yet.
So I stopped in the middle of the room and took another look around.
At first, nothing jumped out at me. But as I took another sweep, I finally saw it.
There was a row of surveillance screens hanging on the far wall. I’d noticed them almost as soon as I’d entered the room but hadn’t given it a second thought since they weren’t recording me. I’d been focused mostly on finding Miles’s valuables. And it’s not unusual for a homeowner like Miles to have his own security cameras to watch what’s going on in his own home. Makes him feel like the master of his castle. Like he’s in control.
But cameras also have another purpose.
They allow the person watching to catch people in moments they intended to be private. Moments they don’t necessarily want other people to witness. And certainly don’t intend to have recorded.
Walking over to the wall of screens slowly, I looked at each one before finding the one I wanted.
Miles’s office.
The one situated right above me.
The control panel was built into the wall right below the screens, and I immediately began to fiddle with it, calling up Miles’s office and then rewinding as far as it would go.
I wasn’t totally sure what I was looking for, but I hurried through the recording anyway, stopping to play it back whenever I saw Miles in the room with someone or on the phone.
Most of it wasn’t helpful. Just a bunch of boring stuff about the real estate business or Miles talking about how important he thought he was.
But then I saw something that made my heart speed up and frantically pressed Play.
It was dated a few weeks ago. Without thinking about it, I pulled out my phone and started to record what I was seeing.
On the screen, Miles had just entered his office, followed by the sketchy lawyer I’d seen in court that day with Uncle Scotty. They were making small talk at first. Miles asked the lawyer how his flight on the private jet had been. The lawyer said it had been fine and added some sleaze-baggy comment about the hotness of the stewardess.
But then the conversation shifted.
On the video, Miles walked over to the bar near his desk and poured himself a few inches of a brown liquid before walking back to his couch and sitting down.
“So where are we on this lawsuit with the broad from the south side?” Miles asked, taking a sip of his drink.
“It’s not going to hold,” the lawyer said, standing in front of his boss. You could tell he’d rather have been sitting, but since Miles hadn’t offered him a seat, he was stuck on his feet. “There’s no evidence that Mrs. Martinez ever asked for anything to be fixed, and without that, they’ve got nothing.”
“And you’re sure they can’t track down those ‘missing requests’?” Miles asked, using air quotes.
“Mr. Miles, we hired the best people in the world to create that site for you,” the lawyer reassured him. “They’ve guaranteed us that requests will disappear as soon as they’re made. There is no way that Mrs. Martinez can prove her case without those requests.”
“Good,” Miles said, nodding thoughtfully. After a moment, he looked back up at the lawyer and gave him a nasty smile. “Still, I think it would be worth reaching out to Judge Meyer. Remind him that we’ve been quiet about that incident of his in Cabo so far, but we might just find ourselves having a crisis of conscience in the future if this doesn’t go our way.”
“Of course,” the lawyer said, nodding as he took out his phone and typed furiously on it for a few seconds.
“Tell me again why we can’t just make these people…disappear? Like the others?” Miles asked, waving his hand in the air languidly.
“That may have worked for them, but Mrs. Martinez isn’t illegal,” the lawyer explained, as if this wasn’t his first time telling Miles this.
“She’s not exactly American, though, either?” Miles said, snorting. He threw the rest of his drink back and stood up, walking over to the bar for another one.
“I promise we’ll make this go away in court,” the lawyer said, clearly not wanting to argue with a guy like Miles.
“You better,” Miles answered, not quite threatening him. It was more a matter-of-fact. “Just remember, I always get what I want.”
“Of course, sir,” the lawyer said. “That’s what I’m here for.”
As I watched the lawyer leave Miles alone in the room, I paused the video and stopped recording.
“That dirty, swindling mouth-breather,” I said angrily.
I turned around to survey the room again and narrowed my eyes as I had another idea. Flipping my phone back toward the walls of Miles’s secret treasure room, I pressed Record.
“You’re not getting what you want this time,” I muttered, and began to record everything I saw.
* * *
Five minutes later, I was headed back up the stairs after the floor automatically opened, and emerged from the hidden entrance beneath Miles’s desk. What little light had been shining behind me disappeared as the floor closed back up and Miles’s desk slipped back into place, leaving me once again in total darkness.
By now, though, I had a feel for the layout of his office and knew that all I needed to do was make my way around the desk and then it was a straight shot to the door.
Ready to get out of there, I quickened my pace until I could feel the presence of the door in front of me. I stopped for just a second to listen for anyone who might be on the other side, but all I could hear was the typical noise of the party in the distance.
