“Who . . . who are you?”

“Me? Oh, I’m nobody now. Chief financial officer of some third-rate architectural firm. That’s where they stuck me to keep me quiet. You don’t even know my name.” He sighed. “I used to be somebody. I was practically royalty in this pathetic town. Then it all came crashing down. It all came crashing down because of two little sluts just like you sneaking around, stealing keys. We lost everything! My father was too busy screwing his brains out to keep his eyes on the prize. He trusted the family business to a bumbling idiot like Bill Thompson. But not to me! Some two-bit waitress was good enough to work the vault, to handle millions of dollars, but not me!”

The smell of sour whiskey burned her nose as he yelled in her face. She grimaced.

He stopped and grinned. “What, have I offended you? You don’t think you’re a slut? Ha! I’ve seen what you do with your little friend.”

He’d seen her with Nick. His teeth glinted in the fluorescent light. They were coffee stained around the edges. Seeing her shudder seemed to please him.

“ ‘Oh God, Nick! Oh, God! Oh God!’ ” he called out, mimicking her voice. “You know, you really should try to play a little hard to get, Iris.”

Her whole body trembled as the blood drained down to her feet. The room began to sway, and she gripped the counter. “It was you. You were following me.”

“Come on, Iris, certainly you of all people know how dull work can be.” He winked at her. “Besides, little valedictorian, something about the pathetic, bored look in your eye every morning you scuttled in late for work told me you were just desperate enough to go poking around this dump. And I was right. Mr. Wheeler thought you’d just keep your head down and do what you were told, like a good little engineer. That would have been smarter, Iris, admit it.”

Iris felt herself nod, while she tried to focus on anything but screaming. Maybe this man was the one who told everyone at the office about her sleeping around. Maybe Nick had nothing to do with it. Her mind scrambled for something to say.

“It was you in the vault that day. Why did you leave the keys?” she asked.

“Leave the keys? Do you really think I’m that stupid? Do you?” He pressed the barrel of the gun into her chest.

“No,” she whimpered.

“You just got lucky. And now you probably think you’re clever because you cracked the code, right? Don’t think for a minute that I couldn’t have figured it out. He couldn’t have, but I could, damn it.”

His finger seemed to twitch on the trigger. She had to keep him talking. “He? Who? You . . . your father? Who was he?”

“Vice president of Who the Fuck Cares? He’s dead. They killed him.” The man stopped and picked up the brown leather book Detective McDonnell had been holding. Iris’s eyes followed the gun down and caught a glimpse of the blood pooled on the floor. She sucked in a sob and shut her eyes. God help me.

“You know, he thought he was so smart. King of the boardroom! Guess he didn’t realize that when he lost the keys to all that money, his golfing buddies weren’t going to take it so well.” He pointed the gun toward the vault. “Get in there.”

Iris obeyed and scrambled away from the blood. He followed her in.

“You know, they called it a suicide, but how many suicides go to the trouble of breaking all of their own fingers before blowing their brains out, I ask you? They needed a scapegoat, someone to feed to the feds . . . They froze our assets. They auctioned off our estate. They left me with nothing and stuck me in a two-bit firm under Wheeler’s thumb. They all counted me out, the bumbling son, but they had no idea who they were dealing with.”

He was growing more and more agitated as he talked, and Iris inched her way to the back of the vault. He stepped even closer. “Every filthy dollar they stashed in this place, I heard about it. Bill couldn’t keep track of the paperwork between banging secretaries. I read the files. I was getting the old man right where I wanted him, and then those two bitches came along.”

“Who?” Iris breathed.

“Shut up.” He pointed the gun in her face and backed her against the far wall. “Nosy bitches like you are always asking questions you shouldn’t and taking things you shouldn’t.”

He slapped her hard across the face. The force knocked her into the side wall in a white flash of pain.

“You came along and found Bill’s chewed-up corpse. That nearly ruined everything. The feds almost blew the doors off this place, but Dad’s old friends weren’t going to let that happen. As it turns out, you did me a favor, didn’t you?”

He stormed out of the vault and back to the detective’s still body. He rolled him over with his foot. The detective’s eyes stared upward lifelessly. Iris sank to her knees with a sob. He was really dead. There was no saving her now. The loud clank of a gun, a flashlight, a pair of handcuffs, and a key being slapped onto the counter echoed down the metal vault where she was trapped.

“I’m finally going to make one of you cunts useful.” He threw the dead key at her head. It hit her in the neck and clinked to the ground. “Get to work.”

CHAPTER 73

For the next hour, the man barked box numbers from the little brown book that had been hidden in Box 547, and Iris opened doors at gunpoint. The first box she pulled out sent her crashing to the ground with one hundred pounds on her chest. The gunman leapt into the vault and yanked it off of her. He threw back the lid and laughed softly. Four gleaming gold bricks lay inside it.

He picked one up and kissed it. “Here’s to commodity trading, Dad.”

Giddy, he carried it out and crossed the corridor to the other vault door. “Do you have any idea what a Good Delivery bar is worth these days?”

Iris stared dumbly as he pulled a huge metal cart over from across the hall. There were three large filing cabinets stacked on its flatbed. Run, a voice in her head screamed. But by the time she’d managed to get back to her feet, the cart was blocking the vault entrance.

“Every single one of these babies can fetch over a hundred seventeen thousand dollars if you can move them.”

He motioned for her to bring the other bricks over. They each weighed over twenty pounds. She carried them one at a time and deposited them into a file drawer, not saying a word.

“I see you thinking over there, Iris. You want to know why they didn’t just drill the boxes open years ago. Why did they let it sit through the gold boom of the ’80s, right?” He pointed the gun at her. “Right?”

She stiffened and nodded obediently.

“Why don’t piranhas just devour each other in a fish tank? Huh? They’re cannibals too. The answer, you twit, is politics.” He grinned, pleased with himself. “The records were scrambled. If any of the families touched a drill, the others would have eaten them alive. It was a twenty-year détente. They’ve been waiting for each other to die. I wish I could be there to see their faces when they realize that they’ve been had.”

Her arms went slack as he talked. She only comprehended a fraction of what he said.

Then he pointed the gun at her again. “Box 357.”

The stack of gold bricks grew four at a time as she opened the doors. He seemed to enjoy watching one hundred pounds of gold fall on her. After the third box nearly broke her foot, he was howling. Iris started yanking the boxes out and dodging them as they banged to the floor as loud as gunshots, making her flinch. A few boxes were filled with cash and jewels, but most were filled with the god-awful weight of gold. Her arms grew rubbery from lifting the bars up from their containers and walking them to her captor.