Helpless

Chapter 67

Tom drove past a dozen hand-painted signs on his way to Marvin’s office. WE LOVE YOU LINDSEY, one of them read. COME HOME SOON, read another. They’d painted Lindsey’s jersey number on many of them.

The first volunteer search effort to look for Lindsay was getting underway. She’d been missing for almost twenty-four hours. Jill’s name was on the volunteer list, along with the names of hundreds of other town residents.

Marvin spoke before Tom had a chance to sit down. “Cortland is fishy,” he said. “And Boyd is caught up in something big.”

“Big in what way?” Tom asked.

“I can’t put all the pieces together yet,” Marvin said.

“Well, what pieces do you have?”

“I think Boyd is somehow profiting off Cortland’s clients.”

Tom looked mystified. “How so?” he asked.

“What do you know about short selling stocks?”

Tom formed the shape of a zero with his fingers. “Zip,” he said.

“It’s a common investing practice,” Marvin explained. “Basically, the investor is making a bet a stock price will drop. But here’s the tricky part. When you short a stock, you’re essentially selling something you don’t own.”

“Oh, that clears it up,” Tom said.

“Think about an agreement between you and a broker. You sell a stock you don’t own, but you have to buy it back. You hope that when you buy it back the price went down, not up.”

“Illustrate please,” Tom said.

“Okay, hypothetically, you think a stock is going to take a dumper. Say it’s trading at a hundred bucks a share, and you think it’s overvalued and going to drop. In this hypothetical example, you short the stock and sell a thousand shares that you don’t own at a hundred bucks a share.”

“Who buys stock that I don’t own?”

“A broker. But they do it with a promise you’ll buy those shares back. So step one, the broker has to give you cash for the stocks you sold but didn’t own. Bang! They put a hundred grand into your account.”

“So it’s like a loan,” Tom said.

Marvin nodded emphatically. “Exactly,” he said. “It’s like a loan. The broker essentially adds the fake shares that you sold to their books. But you’re legally obligated to buy back the thousand shares at some point in time. Either when you want to cover the buy or the broker requests that you cover. You follow?”

Tom gestured yes with a quick head nod and motioned for Marvin to continue.

“Now, let’s say that stock tanks by fifty percent. You decide it’s time to cover that thousand shares. How much do those shares cost you?”

“Fifty grand,” Tom said. “Fifty bucks a share for a thousand shares.”

“How much did the broker dump in your account?”

“A hundred grand.”

“Forgetting the commission and fees you’d owe, what’d you clear?”

“Fifty grand,” Tom said.

“That’s a nice payday,” Marvin added.

“But what if the stock goes up and you have to cover?”

“Then if you’re asked to cover, you’d buy the shares at a loss.”

“And you think Boyd is doing this with Cortland’s help?” Tom asked.

“Well, that I don’t know,” Marvin said. “But I think Boyd may have somehow profited off the misfortune of Cortland’s clients.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It all comes back to my fascination with outliers,” Marvin said.

“Right. In a world of patterns, the evidence that deviates the most from the norm is often the most interesting,” Tom said, paraphrasing what Marvin had once said.

Marvin nodded. “Cause and effect. Rafael Nadal uses a lighter racket with a thinner grip than most men on tour. The result? He generates more spin than Bjorn Borg. Even with outliers like Nadal, there’s always an explanation.”

“And you think you found an outlier with Cortland?”

“I do. That’s why I arranged the meeting. I lied and said I had a rich client who needed reputation management services. But my real intent was to gauge their reaction when I brought up PrimaMed.”

“And?”

“And I started with Boyd. I checked, but he’s not on PrimaMed’s board of directors.”

“Helpful?”

“No, not really,” Marvin said. “Then I asked myself, does he invest in PrimaMed? I mean, that is his primary business. Well, turns out public information about mutual fund investing is pretty limited. But Boyd’s own marketing material shows that one of his funds does in fact invest in PrimaMed.”

“So?”

“So, I looked to see how the fund performed. Is PrimaMed a winning stock? Mostly I’m curious about a specific quarter—when the unfortunate James Mann incident occurred.”

“What did you find?”

“Not much. Hedge fund managers guard their investment strategies with religious zeal. But Lorne Cuthbert does not.”

“Who’s Lorne Cuthbert?” asked Tom.

“He works for Boyd. Bottom-rung guy. I figured he’d give up some information if I gave him the right motivation.”

“And?”

“And I followed him to a bar. Sat on the stool next to his. Pretended that I knew him from an investment seminar, then asked if he cleaned up on PrimaMed like I did.”

“You lied?”

“I deceived,” Marvin said.

“To achieve the objective,” added Tom. “So?”

“We got to talking. He didn’t like that my payday eclipsed his paltry bonus. He was told it was a closed deal. Boyd shorted a lot of PrimaMed stock. Cuthbert, all drunk and fuming mad, recited the numbers off the top of his head.”

“So you think Boyd shorted the stock knowing Mann was going to be arrested and made a profit?”

Marvin nodded. “I checked the stock price for that time period,” Marvin said. “It was flat all quarter, except for a big dip when James Mann got arrested.”

“But how did Boyd know the arrest was going to go down?”

“I’m guessing our friends at Cortland turned Mr. Mann into a child pornographer. And then they tipped off the FBI. But I don’t think that’s Cortland’s only scam. I think they’re inventing online reputation attacks of their own, framing innocent people in the process, and then profiting on the big bucks these corporations pay to clean up the mess Cortland intentionally made.”

“You think Boyd and Cortland did the same thing to me?”

“I do,” Marvin said.

“Why?” asked Tom.

“That, my friend, is the next question to answer.”