Page 78 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

It’s a strange thing for me to say, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She’s my sister. She’s on board. “Aaaaaand you need your brilliant sister to find your wake-up-call girl some other way.”

She puts out a plate of scones.

I take a seat at her table and tell her how I called this morning, and Seven said “go fuck yourself,” and then it sounded a lot like she smashed the phone. Did Sasha instruct her to do that? At any rate, the number is out of order. The email bounces now, as if the account was closed, but it was probably Sasha anyway.

Either there’s an actual service, or it’s somebody Sasha knows.

“Theo,” she says. “The woman said ‘fuck yourself’ and destroyed her phone when you called. Magic 8-Ball says…she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Something else is going on. She wouldn’t just cut things off like that.”

Willow winces.

“Yes, I know how that sounds, but you don’t know her, and I do. If nothing else, I want to make sure things are okay. Did Sasha come down on her somehow?”

“And there’s the thing where you still want to go out to dinner with her.”

I shrug.

Willow sips her coffee. “Let me ask you this. How were you paying for this service?”

“I already hit up accounting. They don’t have the contact information.”

“Right, but how were you paying?”

“PayPal.”

She smiles. “I say we pay them, then.”

“Why?”

“So we can follow the money. Assuming the PayPal account is still there.” She grabs her laptop and we access the accounting department records. It’s there. Willow has me make a thirty-dollar test payment to the specified PayPal account.

“We probably just paid Sasha thirty bucks.”

“I know, but you have to look at everything. Sometimes when you do that and you look at your statement, you get a business name.”

We sit back.

Sure enough, she gets a receipt. From O. Waves. And a string of numbers.

“Is Sasha’s last name Waves?”

“No, it’s Bale.”

“Interesting,” Willow says. “Sea turtle avatar. Huh.”

“Let’s Google O.Waves.”

She gives me a look. “We have something better, Mr. Bond.” She opens up a search engine I don’t know. “Deep Web.” A few clicks later, it turns out the payee is Ocean Waves, a 301C that supports sea turtles.

“Wow,” she says. “She covered her tracks.”

“Damn,” I say. Total dead end.

“Sasha won’t take a bribe to tell who the caller is?”

“She tried to impersonate her, then refused to tell me. I’ve been in business long enough to know when somebody can be bought. All Sasha’s getting is a pink slip as soon as I figure out how to do it without HR up my ass.” I push my palms to my forehead, despondent.

---