to the chair next to him. Begrudgingly, I sit as Paul whips out a laptop. He opens it up, and my eyes almost bug out of my head. His background is a photo of him hugging a woman in a sundress, who’s kissing his cheek lovingly.
The woman is Lizzie Purcell, aka, my persistant midnight visitor out at the Winnebago a few nights ago.
What the fuck?
“Uh, Paul, who…”
He turns and grins at me. “Oh, Lizzie?” his smile widens. “That’s my fiancée, Mr. Marsden.”
I smile thinly at him. “Fantastic, Paul. That’s fantastic for you.”
Poor fucking bastard, I groan inside, but I keep my mouth fucking shut.
“Okay, so, this is my spreadsheet of donations so far, along with our goals and benchmarks.”
Paul opens up an Excel file, and I blink in shock as my jaw about hits the table. For one, because the sheet is meticulous, and highly detailed. But for two, and more importantly, because Paul has somehow managed to crowdsource almost two million dollars for his church. I mean forget this con man shit, I should go out and fundraise for an actual church. I mean, shit.
“Jes—” I catch myself. “Wow, Paul, that’s really impressive.”
He smiles at me. “Thank you, sir. It’s not just from Canaan, though, a few other local communities and churches have pitched in.” He beams. “The Lord has called me to His service, and I’ll do what I must to honor His name with a church worthy of Him. And I think if you felt the call too, as another man of God, I know we’d surely be appreciative of anything you could give for the cause.”
Yeaaah, no fucking way.
I clear my throat and smile at him. “Look, Paul—”
“You know what?” He jumps out of his seat. “Let me go get us some coffees. Are you a latte man, Mr. Marsden?”
“Uh, sure?”
He grins. “My treat. Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”
He darts inside, and I blow air through my lips. Yeah, no damn way am I giving some of my hard-earned, or at least hard-won money towards his dumb church. Not a chance. I frown and look at his spreadsheet, and I shake my head. The figure he’s raised is seriously impressive. It’s envious, actually. My eyes move over the tables, and I shake my head. Yeah, I might be in the wrong business here.
I’m looking at his sheet, when suddenly another sheet pops up, blinking with a message asking if he wants to turn on autosave. Instinctively, because I fucking hate it when my laptop keeps asking dumb questions like that, I click yes for him. But then, that second document stays up, and I start to read it.
…And my eyes go wide.
Holy. Shit.
The document has lists of accounts and terms, and from my own little forays into check fraud, I can read what it is. The motherfucker is setting up a shell game. He’s got the main “trust,” which presumably is where this almost two-million is being held safe to be put towards his church construction. But then, there are “feeder” accounts. The average sucker would look at this shit and haven’t the slightest idea what it is, or that there’s even anything wrong with this. But, I’m no ordinary rube.
I know what a shell game looks like. Hell, Jasper taught me this shit when I was seventeen years old. And I know damn well, in a second, what Paul is up to.
The trick is, you make the “feeder” accounts look like legitimate business. And when I glance over his sheet, that’s exactly what he’s doing. One is branded as a “construction advisory contracting firm.” The other is a geological surveying start-up based in Florida. The only problem?
They’re all Paul’s companies.
I glance through the windows of the cafe, and Paul is yammering away with the barista behind the counter. Fuck it. I open up a folder, and I start poking around. It takes me all of thirty seconds to find the cleverly named “Contracts” folder inside the equally ambiguous “Shell Corps” folder. Apparently, you don’t have to be a genius to pull this off in a trusting place like Canaan.
I open the PDF named “Main Trust Contract,” and I start skimming. Instantly, I frown.
The Trust is in Paul’s name, and the contract is a standard boilerplate one, like pretty much every Trust contract I’ve ever looked at. There’s even the subsection that mentions that in the event of a marriage where finances will be joined, the trust is to be dissolved to avoid compromise. That’s