“Dewell Investigations, this is Cassie.”
“This is RuthAnne Sommers. You called me.”
“Thank you, Ms. Sommers. Did you get a chance to listen to the message?”
“I never listen to messages,” Sommers said with a laugh. “Does anyone?”
I do, Cassie thought but didn’t say.
Sommers had a husky voice that Cassie knew men found attractive. It had a little purr in it and fit with the emotive photos of her she’d seen in the file.
Cassie repeated her message but with less urgency.
Sommers said, “Mr. Spengler cashed the check for his retainer and I never heard from him again. I find that very unprofessional.” She sounded genuinely annoyed.
“I understand,” Cassie said. “I’m not with his firm. I’m doing an independent investigation and Mr. Spengler is tangentially involved.”
“Tangentially? I don’t know that word.”
“It means I’ve been hired to investigate something else but Spengler’s name keeps popping up.”
“Oh, okay. Well, if you find him please tell him I’d like my money back. I don’t want to get fleeced again.”
That set off an alarm bell in Cassie’s head, but she pushed it aside.
“How did you even know to reach out to me?” Sommers asked. “I only met the guy once.”
Cassie told her about the three files she’d been sent from Spengler’s office. “Yours was the most intriguing,” Cassie said. It was blatant flattery, and she almost felt guilty about it.
Sommers laughed. “Yes, the last few years of my life have been … interesting. But if you could see me now you’d be surprised. I’m sitting on the deck of my Sun Valley house drinking wine with a lovely view of Dollar Mountain. I think you could say it all worked out in the end.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It is.” She giggled.
“I’ll try not to take too much of your time here, but I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Will it get my money back?”
“That I can’t promise,” Cassie said.
“Well, go ahead,” Sommers said. Cassie could hear her sip her wine.
“First, can I ask you why you contacted Mr. Spengler in the first place?”
Sommers whooped. “Hell, he contacted me. I’d never heard of the man before. He showed up at our, I mean my, town house in Chicago. He said on the intercom he wanted to speak with me about an important matter. I thought it probably had to do with the divorce, you know? Maybe he had more dirt on my ex-husband?”
“And did he?”
“No,” she said. “And at first I put him off. I asked him to leave his details with the doorman. Believe me, since the divorce I’ve learned to be a lot more careful when it comes to strangers just showing up. It isn’t exactly a secret that I’ve had a windfall, you know?”
“It must be difficult figuring out who you can trust,” Cassie said.
“Oh, it is. But in this case, he left an envelope with my doorman. I opened it and found a couple of blurry photos that I thought I recognized. I ran his name past the PIs we hired during my divorce and they vouched for Spengler. They said he was legit. So I called him and he came over.”
“Yes,” Cassie prompted.
“He told me he was looking for a guy named Daly, I think. Maybe Marc Daly. He wondered if I knew him.”
“Did you?”
“No, not at all. Then he showed me a few more photos. They weren’t very good ones, to be honest. But when I saw them I said, ‘I don’t know this Marc Daly character, but that guy looks a lot like Bill Clark!’”
“Who is Bill Clark?”
Sommers paused while she refilled her glass. Cassie could hear it clearly. She was an expert on the sound of wine being poured into a wineglass.
“Bill Clark is a con man who fleeced me out of five million bucks and then vanished into the wind. He’s the reason I’ve become so cautious when it comes to meeting strangers.”
“Okay,” Cassie said, “let’s start from the beginning. When did you meet Bill Clark?”
“Oh, this is all so embarrassing,” Sommers said. “When I tell you you’re going to think I’m just a gullible idiot.”
“I won’t,” Cassie said. She hoped she wasn’t lying.
“I didn’t know Bill Clark until the divorce proceedings. I’d never even heard of him. But I couldn’t help noticing this man who was sitting in the third row of the courtroom. Same row, same seat, every day.
“He was obviously taking notes during the testimony, I could see him. He had a kind of presence, I must say. He was well-dressed and really good-looking in an intellectual sort of way. I thought he must be a reporter because there were a lot of reporters at the divorce trial.”
“Can you describe him?” Cassie asked.
“Oh yes, I can,” Sommers said with a hard laugh. “Tall, broad shoulders, very fit. He had kind eyes and a sweet smile.”
“Hair? Eyes?”
“Sandy hair, kind of longish,” Sommers said. “Big brown eyes. He wore glasses that made him look smart and he had a trim goatee. Like I said, he almost looked like a college professor. The kind of professor you’d fall in love with, if you know what I mean.”
“Sort of,” Cassie said.
“Anyway, we kept making eye contact during the days of the trial. He seemed sympathetic to me, on my side. One day after we proved that Armond had secret accounts in the Cayman Islands that he hadn’t disclosed, Bill smiled at me and pumped his fist like, ‘Yes.’”
Another sip.
“During a recess I went back into the benches and thanked him for his support. Frankly, it was kind of stupid but it was the only thing I could think of. After all, he couldn’t come through the gate to the plaintiff’s table to meet me.
“He said he was an author working on a book about me and the trial. He said he wanted to tell the truth about Armond and all of his dirty secrets. Bill asked me if after the trial would I agree to be interviewed? I mean, he was totally charming. I said sure, I’d love to talk to him and get my truth out there. You see, Armond had all kinds of PR flacks spreading rumors about me to the press. They were lies—mostly—but the Sommers clan knew how to manipulate the press and the public over to their side. They’d been doing it for years.”
Although Cassie blanched at the phrase “my truth,” she didn’t interrupt. Sommers was on a roll.
“So after the trial where I was awarded a major settlement, we got together,” she said. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I’d been with a man who really listened to me. I mean, really listened. Armond had always been such a cold fish that it was absolutely wonderful to actually be with a man who wanted to hear my story, hear my truth.”
Again, Cassie thought with a roll of her eyes.
“I take it your relationship got more serious,” Cassie said.
“Yes, it did. And rather quickly, I have to say. I mean, I’m ashamed to say.”
“Did you ever suspect he wasn’t who he said he was?” Cassie asked.
“I wish I could say that,” Sommers said with a sigh. “But man, he was good. He gave me signed copies of two other books he’d written. One was about a high-society woman accused of the murder of her husband in Connecticut. The other was about a crazy family in California and how the siblings fought each other for the family fortune. Not that I read them, but I saw that on the jacket flaps, you know?”
“Sure,” Cassie said.
“I still have the books,” she said. “Each one has his name on the cover and his author photo on the back. So yes, I believed him.”
She paused, and said, “Who would have ever thought that a man would go to such lengths as to make up his own jackets and put them on books actually written by real writers? Or replace the title page inside each one with his own name? Who would think to do that?”
“Someone who did a lot of preparation,” Cassie said. “Someone who targeted you well in advance.”
“You’re exactly right,” Sommers said. “That’s why I feel like such a stupid airhead when I tell you about it.”
“How did he get you to give him five million dollars?” Cassie asked.
Sommers moaned. “This is where I really come off as a dolt.”
“You can tell me,” Cassie said.
“Well, Bill claimed that the book he was working on was generating quite a bit of interest in the publishing world, which I know absolutely nothing about. He said he was already receiving offers from movie producers to film my story. I bit on that because I’m so vain,” she said with a bitter chuckle.
“I don’t get it,” Cassie said. “If producers wanted to buy your story…”
“I know,” Sommers said. “I know how it sounds. But Bill made a really good case that once we sold my story I wouldn’t have any control over it. Bill said he’s seen too many people be taken advantage of by Hollywood types. They could make me out to be a gold digger, or a manipulative bitch. Maybe Armond and his toadies would attract the movie people over to his side. But if we financed the production and hired the writers, the director, and the actor to play my part—I’d have control.”
Cassie said, “When you say ‘we’ you mean ‘you.’ I wouldn’t guess Bill agreed to put any money into it.”
“No.” Sommers sighed. “He said his cut would come when he put the deal together. He’s an executive producer, whatever that is. He knew all the movie jargon and I didn’t. And I fell for it.”
“So you wrote him a check for five million to get the movie developed that was based on his book?” Cassie said.
“It was actually a wire transfer,” Sommers said. “Which went to an account in Belize that closed a few days later.”
“And he was gone by the time you realized it,” Cassie said.
“Exactly. He said he was flying out to LA to get things underway. That’s the last I ever heard of him.
“And when I thought about it later, it all made more sense,” she said. “Bill rarely met with me at a public place during the interviews or when we were more serious. He said it was to protect my privacy, but I think it’s so he’d never get caught on a closed-circuit camera or in a press photo. The newspapers were still following me around at the time. When we were out together, he always paid cash, even at expensive restaurants. I should have realized at the time how odd that was but of course he was leaving no paper trail. He said he was staying at the Four Seasons but I never went there or saw his room. When I tried to find him after he vanished they said he’d never checked in.”
“Did you alert the police?” Cassie asked.
“I thought about it, but no.”
“Why not?”
Sommers said, “I was a victim of my own vanity. I knew how it would be portrayed. Armond and his hacks would make sure everyone knew that I paid five million dollars to make a movie about myself. Tell me, how would that look?”
“Not too good,” Cassie conceded. “So did J. D. Spengler offer to try and find Bill Clark?”
“Yes, and I took him up on it,” Sommers said. “Spengler thought that Bill Clark might be an alias for another guy he was looking for. Maybe it was this Marc Daly person you mentioned.”
“But you couldn’t identify him from the photos Spengler showed you?”
“Not for sure. Like I said, Bill had sandy hair, glasses, and a goatee. The fuzzy photos Spengler showed me could have possibly been a different guy. I just couldn’t be sure.”
Cassie said, “I’m going to send you a series of photos taken very recently. Will you please look at them and tell me your conclusion?”
“Sure,” Sommers said. “Send them to this phone.”
Cassie sent the four clearest shots of Matthew Annan in his front yard.
“Oh. My. God,” Sommers said. “Where did you get these?”
“I took them a couple of days ago.”
“It’s Bill all right, that son of a bitch. He’s changed his hair color and shaved his face. But it’s Bill.”
“How sure are you?”
“This might be the wine talking, but I’d say it’s Bill. I’d recognize those rock-hard abs anywhere. So where did you find him?”
“Here in Montana,” Cassie said. “He’s building a home about an hour from where I’m calling you from.”
“I bet it’s a nice place.” Sommers snorted.
“It is.”
Sommers paused. “Are you asking me to hire you to go get him?” She sounded wary.
“No. But I’m going to ask you something much harder.”
“What is that?”
“I’m asking you if you’d testify against him in court if he’s arrested for fraud.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“Think hard,” Cassie said.
Still buzzing from the conversation with Sommers, Cassie tried a wholly different approach with Monica Weatherby and Brooke Alexander. She led with her hole card: the photos she’d taken of Matthew Annan/Marc Daly/Bill Clark. She texted each woman and asked if they recognized the man in the photo and if so would they please call her right away?
The photos got results, and similar stories.
Monica Weatherby said she knew him as Auggie Heinze, a hedge fund billionaire who claimed he was “on the cusp” of financing a start-up that would combine the attributes of Twitter, WhatsApp, and TikTok into a single platform. She fell for him and his pitch and she “invested” four million into his social media company against the opinion of her financial advisors. Auggie Heinze vanished from New York shortly after and the company turned out to be a sham. J. D. Spengler had contacted her and said he was hot on Auggie’s trail and she paid Spengler’s retainer.
Weatherby was annoyed that she hadn’t heard anything from Spengler in the last month, despite several calls to him that went to voice mail. But she was very angry at Heinze.
“If you find that asshole,” Weatherby said to Cassie, “I want my money back. I’d like my pride back, too, but I’m not sure he—or you—can give that.”
Brooke Alexander had a now-familiar story with a couple of fresh angles. The man she’d met introduced himself as Marcus Daly and he claimed to be in the business of buying town houses and apartment buildings in medium-sized US cities like Nashville and Boise where urban professionals had flocked to during the pandemic. That appealed to the Realtor, and so did Marcus Daly, whom she described as “humble, handsome, and very, very smart.” She “invested” $2.5 million and never heard from the man again. Spengler came to her office in Santa Monica and she retained his services to find the man who had both seduced her and bilked her.
“I want to personally kill him,” Alexander told Cassie. “I want to put my hands around his throat and choke him to death. I’m a pretty savvy businesswoman, but he totally conned me. I’ll fly out there to kill him if you can get someone to hold him down.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that last part,” Cassie said. “Let’s just see if we can get him into custody.”
Both women said they’d testify against him if he were arrested and went to court.
Cassie sat back. She was satisfied with her work and unnerved that Annan had been so active. He was a unique kind of predator. How many more women out there had he taken advantage of in this way? Had his charms ever failed him?
Despite their wealth, she felt immensely sorry for the four women he’d targeted and duped. They’d all been alone and vulnerable and he knew it and he’d used it to worm his way into their lives. Having briefly met Annan she could see how it could have happened. Even to her.
Fortunately, she didn’t have millions in her bank account and likely never would. He’d probably sensed that immediately.
What she wondered was how Spengler had identified the three as victims of scams similar to what had happened to Candyce Fly. What had tipped him off that Annan was a serial fraudster? There was nothing in his notes that linked them.
She flipped to a fresh page in her legal pad and wrote:
Marc Daly
Bill Clark
Auggie Heinze
Marcus Daly
Matthew Annan
Something about the names was familiar to her but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Cassie was about to Google the names when April and Ben blew in. Their mood was sky-high even though they both looked dirty and physically exhausted. Cassie motioned for them to come into her office and tell her about their day.
“Mr. Annan kept us working all day but he was really nice,” April said. “Ben cleared rocks from the front grounds and I cleaned out the construction junk from four or five rooms in the house. I’ve never been in such a big house before, I’ll tell you.”
“Did you have any conversations with him?” Cassie asked.
Both nodded. Ben said, “He couldn’t have been friendlier, really. He worked right alongside me for a couple of hours this morning. We talked NBA, elk hunting, and fly-fishing. He said he’d be happy to take me fly-fishing on the Little Blackfoot River someday. He said he hated school when he was growing up, too.”
“You hate school?” Cassie asked, taken aback.
“I keep telling you that,” Ben said with an eye roll.
April said, “He took our orders and went and got lunch for us. That was really cool. And he didn’t take the cost of lunch out of our pay, either.”
“He gave us each a fifty-dollar bonus at the end of the day,” Ben said. “Cash.”
“Don’t be expecting that here,” Cassie said. Then to April: “Did you chat with him as well?”
April nodded. “He asked me about growing up in Wyoming, things like that. He seemed really interested in what I had to say and he kept complimenting me on my work ethic. He said that if he had Ben and me working for him the whole time his house would be completely done.”
“So he charmed you both,” Cassie said.
“I wouldn’t say charmed…” Ben said. “He was just cool, like April said.”
“I’d say charmed,” April said, flushing a little and looking away. “He’s probably the easiest man to talk to I’ve ever met even though he’s way too old for me. If I could find a guy my age who was like that…” She didn’t finish.
“So what is it Matthew is supposed to have done?” Ben asked Cassie. “I feel kind of guilty spying on such a nice guy.”
“Don’t be,” Cassie said.
“So what is it?” April asked. “There’s no way you can convince me Matthew is some kind of criminal.”
Cassie cleared her throat and said, “Let me tell you both something that might surprise you. I’ve been chasing bad guys for a long time both as a cop and now as a PI. Very rarely do people think of themselves as bad. Nearly everybody I’ve chased or brought down think they have really good reasons for their actions. They can justify their bad acts. Even someone as horrible as the Lizard King never took responsibility for the many women he kidnapped, tortured, and killed. He thought he was made to act that way by the way his mother treated him. He thought none of the things he did were his fault.
“So just because someone is nice to you or cool to be around doesn’t mean he’s a good, responsible citizen. Bad men don’t look or act bad in everything they do or say.”
“So you’re not going to tell us?” April asked.
“Not yet.”
“I’d still bet on Mr. Annan as one of the good guys,” Ben said.
“You’d lose that bet,” Cassie said. Then: “Do either of you suspect that he might be onto you?”
Ben and April exchanged glances, then both shook their heads. “He didn’t seem suspicious of me at all,” April said. “He said he was looking forward to seeing both of us tomorrow. I’m kind of looking forward to it, too.”
He told me the same thing, Cassie thought.
“What is this intel you said you had?” she asked.
“Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with Mr. Annan,” April said. Cassie was annoyed at the fervor both April and Ben had shown and continued to show when they defended the man.
“It was someone else,” Ben said.
Cassie arched her eyebrows.
“We were getting ready to get going when this big dude showed up,” April said. “He came right into the house without knocking. When he saw me he told me to get out. It was really rude.”
“What did this man look like?”
“Like April said, he was a big guy,” Ben said. “But old.”
“Maybe in his fifties,” April said. “He had black hair and mean eyes. He walked and acted like he wanted to punch somebody. You know—arms out from his sides, fists clenched, like that.”
Cassie thought: Doug Duplisea.
“Was he wearing a sheriff’s department uniform?” Cassie asked.
“No,” Ben said. “He was wearing a hoodie, jeans, and boots.”
“So what happened?” Cassie asked.
“Well, he just stood there in the great room until I cleared out,” April said. “Mr. Annan apologized to me and told me to wait a minute outside. He seemed real embarrassed. So I went outside and helped Ben finish up.”
“But we could hear them,” Ben said. “They were really arguing about something, really yelling.”
“Not Mr. Annan,” April said. “I never heard him raise his voice. But when I looked in through the front windows he looked pretty angry. And he seemed to be trying to stare down the other guy.”
“The other guy did most of the yelling,” Ben said. “That’s true. He waved his arms around and paced. Mr. Annan just stood there, staring at him.”
“Glaring would be a better word,” April added. “Like he was really pissed off at the guy.”
“How long did it go on?” Cassie asked.
April shrugged. “Who knows? Mr. Annan came out of the house and paid us and told us to drive home carefully. He seemed completely normal when he said it. Then he went back into the house and we left.”
“Interesting,” Cassie said. “Could you hear what this man was saying to Mr. Annan?”
“I wished I could,” April said. “All I could get were the shouts. No real words. I was standing by my truck at the time. Ben was much closer.”
“Ben?”
“No,” Ben said. “I couldn’t really make out what the argument was about. I thought I heard the word like ‘Crestfall’ or ‘Wess-fall,’ maybe.”
Cassie sat up. “Was it ‘Westphal’?”
“Maybe,” Ben said. “I’m not sure. Oh, and I might have heard him say your name.”
“My name?”
“Yeah. I thought I heard him say ‘Cassie Dewell.’ It might have been something else, but it sure sounded like it to me.”
Cassie asked, “What was this man driving?”
April indicated she hadn’t paid any attention to his vehicle.
But Ben said, “He drove a silver GMC pickup. Maybe a couple of years old, but really nice.”
April looked harshly at Ben. She was embarrassed for not knowing.
“Hey,” Ben said to her with a grin. “That’s the kind of thing I notice.”
Cassie nodded slowly. Things were starting to come together. She said, “You two won’t be going back to Matthew Annan’s place tomorrow. You’ve done good work, but that job is over.”
“But we like him,” April said. There was hurt in her eyes. “We don’t want to let him down and just not show up.”
“He’s a man who is easy to like,” Cassie said. “You’d be surprised how many people out there would agree with you.”
“Can I at least text him and let him know?” April asked.
“No. We don’t want him to know your number or anything more about you. Either of you,” she said, moving her eyes to Ben.
“He paid pretty good, too,” Ben said with a resigned shrug. “Much better than Dewell Investigations.”