As soon as they got back from their honeymoon, he got to work. Over the next few months, all of Zoe and Conner’s free time and money had been dedicated to fixing up their home. They spackled and sanded, painted and polished. Furniture was moved around and rooms restaged. The remainder of Zoe’s inheritance had been used to update the kitchen.

“If we use the last of this money to redo the kitchen we won’t have any cushion,” said Zoe as she wrote a check to a contractor to begin the work. “This is the last of it.”

“We’ll be fine,” Conner had said. “Between the two of us, we’ll make it work.”

Those early days were full of joy and their future was so bright that they even talked of having a baby in another two years.

“What did I do to deserve you?” said Conner one Sunday evening when they had finished painting for the day. “Love you, Zoe.”

“Love you, more,” she had replied as she picked a splatter of dried paint off of her husband’s cheek.

With those happy memories, curled up alone in her bed in a fetal position, Zoe finally drifted off to sleep with a smile on her face.

27

That night in his hotel room in Virginia, Conner tossed and turned. The contentious call he had earlier that night with his wife was keeping him up. Two more days of training and then home. Zoe is going off again. Bird-watching? Give me a break.

Between his training at Quantico, the long-term white-collar crime case he had been working undercover in Manhattan, and his wife’s possible slip off the sanity wagon, Conner Brandt was stressed out.

He’d been working on the Citizen’s Investment Group (CIG) case since the previous fall. Jordan Spaulding, the CEO and grand wizard of the company was considered a Wall Street investment phenom. What put CIG on the FBI’s radar was that Spaulding’s clients consistently made higher returns on their investment than any other investment company in New York. It had been going on for more than a decade. No matter what the market was doing, Spaulding’s clients always made a bundle. The secretive financial wizard was historically selective about who he let into his relatively small circle of investors. He only wanted the high rollers. Minimum investment to become a CIG client—a sweet five million. Anything less than that and CIG and Jordan Spaulding were simply not interested. The company kept their clients happy by giving them an unbelievable return on their investment and in exchange for that, their clients didn’t ask any questions. Trouble was, nobody could figure out how CIG brought in those high returns so consistently.