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  For all the people who gave me 500,000 reasons for writing this book. Whoever you are; you know who you are.

  Clawback: Proceeds from an investment that is found to be fraudulent are confiscated and then redistributed to all investors on a proportional basis.

  Prologue

  After years of running Sedona’s Sugarloaf Café, Bob Larson was enjoying the fruits of his labors and one of the most enjoyable benefits of retirement—the opportunity to sit at the kitchen counter, linger over a second cup of coffee, and watch the morning news. Short-order cooks in diners never see the news at that time of day. They’re always too busy dealing with the morning rush.

  His attention had drifted momentarily to an Anna’s hummingbird delicately sipping nectar from the blooming paloverde just outside the living room window, but the words “Ocotillo Fund Management” penetrated his consciousness and drew his attention back to the screen. Realizing he’d missed the first part of the story, he grabbed the remote and ran the footage back to the beginning of the segment, so the sweet-faced, blond-haired news anchor could take another crack at it.

  “Yesterday, employees at Phoenix-based Ocotillo Fund Management were sent home early with the doors chained shut behind them and the company out of business. Late yesterday afternoon, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they are launching a full investigation into allegations that monies invested with the company have gone missing. An unnamed source who is also a former employee of the firm said that the move came as a complete surprise to all concerned. This morning, we’ve left several messages for the company’s founder and CEO, Jason McKinzie. So far those messages have gone unanswered.”

  Bob could barely believe what he was hearing. Ocotillo Fund Management? That Ocotillo Fund Management—the very company Bob and his wife, Edie, had chosen to manage their retirement funds? How could it be? With his heart hammering in his chest and both hands shaking, Bob set down his coffee mug and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through his contacts list until he found Dan Frazier’s number—numbers, actually—work, home in Sedona, home in Paradise Valley, and cell. He tried the cell as well as both home numbers. Those calls all went to voice mail. The last one—to the work number—didn’t go through at all. Instead there was a tuneless three-toned signal followed by the standard notification.

  “The number you have reached is not in service at this time. If you feel you have reached this message in error, please check the number and try again.”

  Bob Larson did not try again. He ended the call and slipped the phone into the pocket of his worn khaki shirt. That was only to be expected. If the office’s doors were in lockdown, most likely the phones would have been turned off as well. So it was frustrating but hardly a surprise that there was no answer—no answer on the phones and no answers to his questions and no answers to his fears, either. All the while he’d been trying to call, a clutch of dread had grabbed his gut and twisted it, turning that last half-drunk cup of morning coffee into pure acid.

  Abandoning both the TV remote and his coffee cup on the kitchen counter, Bob staggered over to one of the pair of easy chairs he and Edie had bought new when it came time to furnish their newly rented two-bedroom unit at Sedona Shadows. He was grateful Edie wasn’t there with him and hadn’t seen the news. She had gone off an hour earlier for her morning water aerobics session. She was still down at the pool, doing whatever it was the ladies did for an hour or more every morning. He could imagine her chatting away with her pals, blissfully unaware of the financial calamity that had just befallen them, but Bob was fully aware. He understood it completely.

  Their nest egg was gone. Wiped out. The safety net he and Edie had carefully put aside for a rainy day had evaporated. Much as Bob wanted to unknow the extent of what had just happened, he couldn’t. He also knew it was his fault. Not his alone, of course—damn Dan Frazier anyway. That was the thing that was causing that white-hot knot of anger to form in Bob’s gut. He and Dan were friends—at least that’s what he had thought—friends first and clients later.

  They’d known each other since their early twenties. When Dan’s dream of becoming a CPA had come to grief, he’d gone to work in his father’s property and casualty insurance agency right there in town, where Bob and Edie Larson had been among his first customers. They’d stuck with him through the years as Dan’s insurance business grew and prospered. Over time he had added an alphabet soup of official designations after his name, enough incomprehensible letters to choke a horse—Chartered this and Certified that.

  Somewhere along the way, Dan had hit the big time, partnering with Jason McKinzie, a young hotshot financial wizard specializing in wealth management who had taken central Arizona by storm. Eventually Jason had invited Dan to join Ocotillo Fund Management, and where Dan Frazier went, Bob and Edie inevitably followed.

  Once on board the OFM juggernaut, Dan had continued to maintain his Sedona office, running the insurance part of the business with underlings, while he spent most of his time operating out of the corporate office in Phoenix—the very one where the doors had been locked and the phones were no longer in service.

  Dan had been a regular at the Sugarloaf, back when Edie’s mother had still owned it. He and Dan had worked several community service projects over the years, and when Dan was able to go to a Barrett-Jackson auction and acquire a fully restored 1966 Mustang convertible, he had come to Bob looking for advice on the care and feeding of it.

  Through the years, Bob and Edie had faithfully salted money away for retirement, stashing it in Ocotillo-managed accounts that Dan had recommended. When Bob reached age seventy-and-a-half and had to start taking annual distributions, they’d still been running the restaurant and hadn’t needed the money, so they had plugged those funds back into non-tax-deferred accounts with Ocotillo as well. When they had finally decided to sell the diner, Dan had used his connections to help locate the business broker who had effected the transaction. Since their unit in Sedona Shadows was essentially a rental, they’d had to pay a deposit, but they hadn’t needed either a down payment or a mortgage. That’s when they decided to put the proceeds from the sale of the restaurant into an Ocotillo account as well.

  “Are you sure about this?” the always practical Edie had asked. “Isn’t it a lot like putting all our eggs in one basket?”

  “Dan’s a good friend,” Bob had replied. “He wouldn’t steer us wrong, would he?”

  That was the problem. Obviously Dan Frazier had done exactly that—steered them wrong. Bob remembered every detail about their discussion that day, shortly after the sale of the restaurant—every single word. Dan had told him everything would be fine—that their money would be perfectly safe. Only it wasn’t, and now all their retirement eggs were shattered, lost beyond repair.

  The news reporter had mentioned that the SEC was now involved, and Bob had no idea what that meant or what would happen next. Bankruptcy, maybe? Lawyers? All of that was above his pay grade, but Bob did understand that if lawyers got their grubby paws on the process, whatever happened next was bound to be expensive. If he and Edie were lucky—very lucky—they’d maybe get pennies back on the dollar from an amount that, with the sale of the diner as well as the accompanying living quarters, had risen to a total of over a million bucks.

  When they sold the Sugarloaf, they had splurged on a new Buick for Edie—her toes-up Buick, as she called it—and on some new furniture for their unit
at Sedona Shadows, but the rest of the money had been handed over to none other than Ocotillo Fund Management!

  When Dan had first urged them to move their IRAs and defined benefit accounts to Ocotillo, he had brought them a shiny, full-color prospectus delineating the various funds and their expected returns. There had been all the CYA stuff about “historical returns are no guarantee of future results,” and Bob had wondered about that.

  “How can Jason McKinzie make these returns happen?” Edie had asked, after reading through one of them. “How is it possible for him to beat everyone else’s earnings by two to four points?”

  “By being smarter than the average bear,” Dan had replied with an engaging grin. “He’s bright enough to spot market corrections coming in advance. That way he unloads underachieving properties before things go south, giving him cash to reinvest while prices are still low. That’s what you have to do in this business—be ahead of the curve.”

  In the end, though, having voiced her opinion, Edie had left the final decision up to Bob. “I’m the one who knows everything there is to know about flour and yeast,” she told him. “You’re the one with the head for business.”

  Armed with Edie’s somewhat grudging agreement, Bob had gone along with his old friend Dan, and signed on the dotted line. Ocotillo had three separate funds for him to choose from, and Bob had opted for the most conservative of the three. Two points above the market was one thing. Four points or six? That sounded like too much of a good thing, so he had settled on the lowest one.

  But now even that fund had been wiped out. Ocotillo was out of business. The office was locked, the phones were off. As for Jason McKinzie? Bob realized that McKinzie was most likely in the wind, but what about Dan Frazier—Bob’s good friend, his old pal? What was he doing right about now? Did he have the good grace to at least feel guilty about what had happened? Was he ashamed of himself for not warning people in advance?

  That was the thing Bob could hardly stomach. Dan must have known this was coming. The “unnamed source” the newscaster referred to, the one who said all this came as a “complete surprise,” was maybe low enough on the totem pole that he’d had no idea about what was happening, but Dan was another story. Supposedly Dan had been part of upper management in the firm—at least that was how he’d had presented himself as far as Bob and Edie were concerned. If the venture was about to implode, he must have had some inkling in advance that something was wrong.

  And yet, a few weeks earlier, when Bob and Edie had run into Dan and Millie Frazier at the annual Kiwanis Mother’s Day Pancake Feed at the high school, Dan had been his jolly old self, glad-handing everyone who came within reach and giving the ladies, Edie included, discreet pecks on the cheek. It irked Bob now to realize that, the entire time, Dan must have been putting on a show and pretending that everything was A-OK. He hadn’t said a word to Bob that day that had hinted that anything was amiss—nothing to warn his loyal clientele of the oncoming train wreck.

  Dan had been a businessman in town for decades, so it stood to reason that he was well known in the community, but today Bob couldn’t help wondering how many other folks attending that pancake breakfast had been duped out of their life savings in the same way he and Edie had. How many poor rubes had that low-down snake in the grass greeted that morning with his firm handshake and misleading smile? Remembering that breakfast, Bob blinked back to the memory of introducing him to Betsy Peterson, one of Sedona Shadows’ most recent arrivals and the grandmother of his grandson’s wife, Athena.

  Betsy was still in the process of selling her properties in Minnesota, and Bob had intended to introduce her to Dan with the recommendation that she might consider putting her funds under Dan’s management. At the time, Betsy had responded with a firm “Thanks, but no thanks.” Bob had been a little put off by that, but now he was supremely grateful that she had. At least Bob had dodged that bullet.

  Glancing at his watch, Bob realized that Edie and Betsy would soon be finishing up with water aerobics and might return to their unit any minute. To everyone’s surprise, after arriving at Sedona Shadows, eightysomething Betsy had taken to Edie Larson and to water aerobics like nobody’s business. The two women were fast friends now, relishing their daily sessions in the pool along with a shared interest in a set of mutual great-grandkids. And once the aerobics session was over, they often returned to Bob and Edie’s apartment for what Betsy and Edie both referred to as “forenoon coffee.”

  Right that moment, Bob wasn’t ready to face either one of them. It was going to be hard enough to tell Edie about the situation. Doing so in front of a third party was utterly unthinkable. Besides, what Bob really wanted to do was track down Dan Frazier and punch the guy in the nose—or, at the very least, give the jerk a piece of his mind.

  Standing up, Bob grabbed his keys off the table by the door, and headed for the vintage ’72 Bronco that—due to his skill as a mechanic—still ran like a top. Bob’s aging Bronco and Dan Frazier’s recently purchased Mustang were only six years apart in terms of model years, but no one would mistake Bob’s workhorse vehicle for a showpiece. The Mustang was a low-mileage, highly polished, spoiled brat of a car, best used in fair-weather conditions only. The Bronco, on the other hand, dented but dependable, was a one-owner, four-wheel-drive beast that had gotten Bob out of more than one tricky off-road situation. If the odometer—the one thing that didn’t work—had still been functioning, Bob estimated it would have turned over for the fourth time well before this.

  Not wanting to encounter the women on their way into the building, Bob double-timed it down the hall in the opposite direction and let himself outside through a side entrance near his assigned covered parking spot. As he drove the few miles and many roundabouts on his way to Dan’s place on the far side of town, Bob realized this was probably a fool’s errand. Jason McKinzie had most likely run for the hills well in advance of the collapse, and Dan Frazier might have pulled a similar stunt. Still, going to Dan’s place gave Bob a good excuse for not facing Edie right then and there and having to give her the bad news.

  Dan Frazier’s Sedona residence on Elberta Drive was modest in terms of Sedona’s current real estate market, which tended toward the McMansion end of the housing spectrum. The house dated from an earlier time in his career, from when Dan had just started working for his father’s insurance agency, and from an earlier era in terms of housing design. The in-town location meant it was long on convenience and had reasonably good views. Still, this one was little more than humble pie when compared to the spectacular hillside residence Millie and Dan occupied in Paradise Valley. That one came complete with a four-car garage. The one in Sedona was two cars only.

  Once Bob turned off onto Elberta Drive, he stopped two houses short of the recently installed rolling gate at the bottom of Dan’s driveway. For a time—a period of several minutes—Bob simply sat there with the car windows open and the engine running, trying to consider what the hell he was going to say to this man who had once been his friend: How could you do this to us? How dare you do this? What the hell kind of friend are you? None of those seemed adequate to the situation at hand.

  At last, having had time to cool his temper and resolving to remain civil, Bob finally put the Bronco in gear and moved forward. Arriving at the end of the driveway, he was surprised to see Dan’s rolling gate standing wide open. It was one of those that required the use of a remote. Installed after the purchase of that prized Mustang, Bob never remembered seeing it left open before—day or night.

  As Bob crested the driveway and jammed the Bronco into park, one of the two garage doors began to rise. Once it was open, Bob saw that two cars were parked inside—Dan’s Mustang and Millie’s Volvo XV60. He more than half expected that one or the other of the vehicles, unaware of Bob’s presence, would slam into gear and come speeding out of the garage. Realizing that any resulting collision was bound to be harder on either of Dan’s upscale vehicles than it would be on the aging Bronco, Bob braced for a crash.
r />   Except nothing happened. Neither of the two vehicles moved. The backup lights didn’t come on, and there was no sign of life inside the garage. After waiting for the better part of a minute for someone to emerge, Bob finally gave up, shut off the engine, and exited his own vehicle. Only when he entered the garage did he hear the low rumble of the Mustang’s idling V-8 engine, but no driver was visible behind the wheel.

  “Hey, Dan,” Bob called. “Are you in there?”

  For a time there was no answer, then, over the hum of the engine, he heard a faint call. “Help me. Please.”

  The call for help seemed to be coming from the car, so Bob sprinted forward. Only when he was even with the Mustang’s driver’s side door did Bob realize there was a lone occupant inside the vehicle. Dan, seated behind the wheel, was slumped over onto the passenger seat in an unnatural position that left none of his head showing over the seat back. Both of Dan’s eyes had vivid bruises around them, standing in sharp contrast to the pasty gray coloring of face. His lips were cut and swollen. Someone had clearly beaten the crap out of the man. Then Bob’s eyes were drawn to the bright scarlet stain spreading up and down a once spotless white shirt. Dan held one hand tightly against the wound, as if trying to stem the flow, but it wasn’t working.

  Bob had served as a corpsman in Vietnam. He knew his way around bloody wounds, and he knew way too much blood when he saw it. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911. “We need help!” he barked into the phone when an emergency operator answered. “Man down and seriously wounded. Can’t tell if he’s been gunshot or if it’s a knife wound.”

  “Knife,” Dan managed weakly through clenched teeth. “They both had knives.”

  “Make that a knife wound,” Bob corrected. “And there were two of them.”

  With his phone still on speaker, Bob spat out Dan’s address. Then, with the call still active, he slipped the device into his shirt pocket, freeing both hands so he could reach inside, hoping to help apply pressure on the wound even though he already suspected that the damage was too severe. The wound was bleeding profusely. The stain was spreading at such an alarming rate that Bob doubted it was survivable.