No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7 by Sara M. Barton Page B

his assistant.
    “Try ‘Gloria’s too much’,” I
suggested. Bosco typed it into the password slot. “He’s always
talking about how wonderful she is.”
    “That’s too long,” he
decided. “And I can’t use the apostrophe. But I could substitute
the number two for the word too. And what do you know? We’re
in.”
    Ralph’s computer screen
sprang to life as the password unlocked its secrets. Bosco got to
work.
    “Where do you start?” I
wondered aloud.
    “Wink-Wink Productions,” he
responded. His fingers flew across the keyboard and suddenly we
were looking at the website for Wink-Wink. ”Ralph has it on his
favorites bar.”
    “Let’s check out ‘About
Us”,” he suggested. The web page downloaded and I
gasped.
    “George.” Bosco rubbed the
back of his head in wonder, looking at the man identified as
Gregory Wink. “That son of a bitch!”
    “No,” I cried.
“Her!”
    He followed my finger to the
photo of Tatiana S. Wink, co-founder of Wink-Wink Productions.
There she was, in all her glory, grinning up as the social media
and Internet marketing maven.
    “George has a wife,” scoffed
Bosco. “What a low-down, dirty, rat-faced bastard!”
    “She’s the woman who pushed
me into his arms at the resort! She claimed she and George had only
been dating a short while!”
    “Made for each other,” Bosco
decided. “They’ve been partners for ten years, according to their
website. Interesting. We can look at this crap when we get home,
though. Let’s focus on Ralph’s communications with George and
Tatiana.”
    He opened Ralph’s emails,
searching for something, anything suspicious. There was nothing
from Wink-Wink.
    “Try Tatiana Stevanovich,” I
suggested.
    “Why?” Bosco wanted to
know.
    “If George...Gregory seduced
me, maybe Tatiana seduced Ralph.”
    “There’s a thought.” Sure
enough, there were several emails back and forth around the time
that I met the fake George. “They met at Foxwoods.”
    “The casino? What was Ralph
doing down there?”
    “More importantly, what was
Tatiana doing down there?” he responded.
    “Romance?” I leaned over
Bosco’s shoulder, reading.
    “It doesn’t look like it. It
looks more like a money thing.”
    “She roped him
in?”
    “It looks like Gregory and
Tatiana Wink are frequent visitors at the casino, too. Ralph seems
to have talked to them about some kind of deal. Tatiana tells him
in the email they can work something out.”
    “What does that mean? He’s
been embezzling from Dynamic Productions?”
    “I don’t think
so.”
    “What’s in it for them?” I
wondered. “Why wouldn’t they want to be involved with Ralph, with
the business?”
    Bosco sat back in Ralph’s
desk chair. I could see him in the narrow beam of the flashlight.
He was thinking hard.
    “Maybe this is a
money-laundering scheme,” he said.
    “Oh, come on,” I sighed.
“Why are you so determined to prove some criminal connection? Why
can’t George and Tati just be mean people who like to rip off
idiots like me and Ralph?”
    “Because that’s not how the
world of finance works, babe. Any couple going to this much trouble
to gain the upper hand of Dynamic Productions has bigger goals in
sight. If this was just about money, they’d take it and scram.
Instead, they want to hold onto the company. They need the company
for some kind of business.”
    As much as I wanted to
dismiss his theory, I had to admit there might be some basis for
it.
    “But, Bosco, why steal my
money at the same time they were going after Ralph?”
    “They need you gone, Dori.
You’re the problem. Ralph must have told them you and I own stock.
And they had to have known you work for Ralph. With you out of the
picture, Ralph owns the company free and clear. He can turn it over
to them without losing face. They’ll probably hook up with a
criminal organization and launder profits through
Dynamic.”
    “Why steal my money? Why
blow up the house? Why ruin me?”
    “To make you