Maybe she should have another cup of coffee and call Cosmo just to chat. An early bird, he was probably up and getting ready to start his day. She hated the three-hour time difference, but there was nothing she could do about it. Cosmo told her not to worry about time, to call him any time of the day or night. She loved talking to her new husband, loved the deep timbre of his voice, which he considered a whisper even though it could be heard a mile away. She melted inside whenever he called her Elizabeth. She hit the number 1 on her speed dial and waited.
“Elizabeth! How wonderful to hear your voice. What are you doing?”
Feeling like a teenager in the throes of first love, she told him. “I’m not sure how to play it, Cricket.”
The booming, intimate laugh that greeted her ears made her smile. “Sure you do, honey, you just want to hear me say, go for it.”
“How’d you get so smart, Cricket?”
“Hanging around you, Elizabeth. I miss you. We never decided if I should come east or you should come west this weekend. I think it should be me who does the traveling this time. It sounds to me like you have your hands full. Is there anything I can do for you from out here?”
“I wish there were, Cricket. I have to play this out on my own. Unless you know some people in the credit card industry you can squeeze.”
The silence on the other end of the phone told Lizzie there was a ray of hope somewhere. Her fist shot in the air was when Cosmo asked, “Which credit card companies?”
“Chase and Barclays were Harry’s legitimate cards, the ones he paid off at the end of the month. The fraudulent ones are Citi Platinum Select, American Express, Capital One Platinum Prestige, Wells Fargo Prime Rate Visa, Wells Fargo Platinum, and there’s one for Hooters and one for Walmart.”
“Do you have the credit card numbers, honey?”
“I do.” Lizzie rattled them off. “Are you saying you can help, Cricket?”
“I’m going to try. Five will get you ten that some of those wheeler-dealers have a history here in Vegas. I’ll just have to find that history. Are you smiling, honey?”
“Cricket, I am grinning from ear to ear. How long will it take you before you know something?”
Cosmo countered with a question. “What time is your meeting at the bank?”
“I don’t have an appointment, Cricket. I was going to wing it. The surprise element, you know.”
“In that case, give me forty-five minutes to get to the office and another ninety minutes to see what I come up with. Will that work for you?”
“Yes, Cricket, that will absolutely work for me. I was planning on stopping at the Post to talk to Maggie first, anyway.”
“Elizabeth, how much money are we talking about in regard to Harry Wong?”
“At first we thought it was around $200,000, but when I did my final tally, it’s a few dollars shy of half a million. This is some really serious money, Cricket. Multiply that number by whatever number you pull out of your hat, and the amount is staggering. The Post, Maggie in particular, is working on it. She’s still totaling up the numbers other consumers have lost, then she’s going to go full bore, a big, black WAR headline to gain the readers’ attention. The timing is something we have to work on because we don’t want to alert the credit card ring before the girls can go after them. Did all that make sense, Cricket?”