“About 600 per month.”
David recognized the look on his mother’s face. Alyssa had potentially just made her a lot of money. He had once thought that you could figure out almost anything by using statistics. If Target could uncover women who were pregnant just by buying patterns, he’d reasoned his mom could do something similar to find buyers and sellers of real estate.
When he’d been in New York, he’d asked Grace to dig into doing something nationwide. She’d already forwarded a memo from one of her worker bees. They’d found that Google earned several billion dollars a year by doing something similar with targeted advertising.
Amazon and eBay sorted your searches by showing ‘featured’ products first by figuring out popular search terms. They knew that most people didn’t scroll down to find what they wanted; they clicked on the links at the top of the page.
David reasoned that the folks at Target, Google, Amazon, and eBay were intelligent people, and they wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t money to be made. It was only a matter of time before someone put it all together into one giant data repository. Once that happened, you could find out almost anything about anyone.
Before he left, he had a private word with his mother.
“If any of Alyssa’s ideas turn out to be big, we need to make sure she shares in the benefits.”
“I agree. I put your dad in charge of figuring out what’s fair. I know you don’t want to ‘steal’ a big idea like many corporations have done in the past. We’ll make sure that she gets compensated. I just have to confirm that the ideas are moneymakers before I pay them out,” Carol said.
David couldn’t argue with that. But he also believed that people should share in the rewards when they did well.
◊◊◊
David had one more meeting today that he’d been putting off. He was meeting with Fritz, the man in charge of his security.
“What’s the deal with your new security guys?” David asked.
“We have some training opportunities,” Fritz said diplomatically.
“I’m not sure I want the guy you sent to the UK with me.”
“Don’t worry about it. He has moved on to ‘better opportunities,’” Fritz promised.
“Don’t BS me. Do I need security at school?” David asked.
“I think we get someone to live in your townhouse through the summer and see how it goes from there,” Fritz suggested.
David hated to agree, but the James Bond movie had started to make his life crazy. It also didn’t help that the studio had released pictures, and then, like an idiot, he’d done that magazine shoot for Adrienne. She texted him to let him know that they’d had to make two additional runs to meet demand. He was glad some charity had made money, but he should have known better.
“I already have Cassidy living with me.”
“She quit.”
“What?!” David asked in surprise.
“She told me that she wanted to focus on school and rowing.”
David thought about it for a moment. Those were valid reasons, but he knew Cassidy. She would miss the paychecks.
“Do me a favor. Leave Cassidy on the payroll, but tell her she’s only my security for emergencies. I don’t want her to have to come to me for money,” he decided.
“She said that she had a training business,” Fritz said.
That she did. David had forgotten that she’d figured out how to make money off his friends who lived in his dorm, the Palace. The girls she hadn’t run off as being wimps had shown excellent results. Cassidy had declared them all ready for bikini season.
Cassidy had also trained the USC football players preparing for the draft. Ridge Townsend was still singing her praises.
She must have talked to his brother about doing massages because Greg wasn’t looking very hard for work this summer. His brother would start grad school in the fall and wanted to get his kids settled in their new home, so he wasn’t seeking full-time employment. David was a bit jealous of the slacker.
“I guess she figured it out. Do as she asked,” he decided.
“I have someone in mind to be your on-site security. They might even be able to run you into the ground on your morning runs,” Fritz said.
“We’ll see,” David said, not believing him.
“I’ve gotten the background checks on all the new recruits. All but two came back clean,” the security guy said as he handed David two folders.
David planned to work with the 13 new football players and had followed his own advice. If he planned to spend a lot of time with someone, he would take the precaution of having them checked out. He opened the first one a quickly scanned it.
The first player was Nick ‘Big Cat’ Collins.
His father had died of cancer last fall before his final football game. This was the same father who had beaten him at the age of seven so severely he spent a week in the hospital.
Nick had grown up in Baltimore in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the country. At the young age of his hospitalization, he was only one year away from his stepbrother going to jail for the first time for drug possession. He was only nine years away from having his best friend gunned down in front of him and dying in his arms.
Nick’s salvation was his mother. She’d kept him out of trouble and the gangs that ran their housing project. He was the youngest of seven children, with five sisters and one stepbrother. The neighborhood worked to keep him on the straight and narrow. Their dream was that someday he would get his college education, become an NFL star, and help his family move out of the war zone they were currently in.
Nick had fought the odds where only half of the kids that started high school graduated.
There was a picture attached of a determined-looking black man with multiple tattoos and tight cornrows.
The second file was for Oliver Shaw, a 25-year-old punter from Australia.
He had a long rap sheet of bar fights, petty theft, and something disturbing: he’d been accused of having sex with some underage girls—15 to 16 years old. The girls had attended parties and may or may not have willingly agreed to be with him. He was in his early twenties at the time. The girls had all been drunk out of their minds when the acts occurred.
Officially, the charges had all been dropped. The investigator had uncovered that Oliver had gotten them all pregnant and offered to pay for abortions. Once that was done, their parents just wanted it all to go away.
David nodded and handed the folder back to Fritz.
“And that other item you asked for,” Fritz said, handing him another folder.
David opened it and cringed. He’d asked him to look into the Lexi and Ben mess. He didn’t want to accuse Lexi of anything solely from what Isabel had sent him. Over the past week, it was confirmed that there were at least five ‘encounters,’ as the report called them.
“I have pictures and video if you need to see it,” the man said.
“I’d rather not,” David said.
He forced himself not to go to that dark place and then shook his head to clear it. Then he surprised Fritz when he chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was trying to remember the last time I’d had sex.”
“Over two months ago,” Fritz supplied.
David had gotten over the creepy feeling of knowing that Big Brother, aka his security team, monitored him twenty-four/seven. If anyone would know, it was Fritz. David prayed that the NDA he had in place with his security company was bulletproof.
“We have a pool as to how long you’ll remain celibate. I lost when you didn’t hook up with Ashley in Vegas,” Fritz shared.
David called him a bad name, and they both laughed.
“I might have to get in on that,” David suggested.
“All kidding aside, I’m sorry about Lexi. I know you cared for her,” Fritz said.
‘Me, too,’ David thought.
◊◊◊
Chapter 13