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[Fic] Corporate Idols


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Livy sighed and stretched her body, shoving herself against the wooden library chair with near-violence. The pressure felt as good as the long stretch and Livy moaned a little at the sweet sensation. She realized she’d pulled her shirt up and she started to tug it back down when she caught sight of a geeky, young, white boy staring at her exposed midriff. She stared at him until his eyes jerked up; she rose to her feet, grinning, and walked toward him.

His face was pale as he looked up at her, expecting to be chewed out for staring at her. “Like what you see?” she whispered, leaning on the table and eying him. He was cute, in a strangely intellectual way.

He was torn between confessing that, yes, he did like it, and the sure sense that this beautiful woman was teasing him. Finally, he muttered, “No.”

Livy knew he was lying; she leaned in and put her lips next to his ear. “Too bad,” Livy murmured, then pulled back with a Cheshire smile. She met his eyes as he fumbled for a protest that wouldn’t make him sound like a dork, but his time was up before he came up with anything. She turned and was gathering up her books as his brain was still working past, ‘But girls like you never come onto guys like me, so how was I to know you were serious!’.

She left the reading room, her mind discarding the young man as he cursed his flaccid tongue. She was already thinking ahead to her next task, now that her homework was done: the Rexrout file. It was a pet project of hers, one that she had gotten involved in just a couple of months ago. Arthur Rollins had been another student, an older, non-traditional one, who had been in the journalism program part-time. He’d given her a file folder of information once and asked her to keep it for him; then he’d moved away without warning or asking for it back. That had unnerved her a little; while he’d insisted that it wasn’t anything big, he had insisted that she keep it safe and hidden.

After he had gone, she’d read it. It had been a bunch of articles printed from the internet, covering the activities of some company. There’d been everything from new acquisitions to reports on the corporate officers. The articles had covered the basics; Sykes Investments was local, and was one of those businesses whose business was making money. The owner was Roderick Sykes, a local Bostonian and fiscal guru. At her initial reading, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong or unusual about them.

After long thought, she’d decided to do a bit more research. It would only cost her time. She moved to one of the computers and logged into the system. Researching companies wasn’t exactly like researching other things. The data on a public company was available, but it wasn’t always easily found. She had a class specifically on special research; it had brushed over the best way to find information on legal proceedings, businesses, laws and other things that just weren’t as easy to find as most people thought they were. Business information was very valuable; it was usually only available in databases that were expensive to maintain – and equally expensive to buy access to. Thankfully, many big libraries choose to buy into these databases and offer them to their students. So Livy had access to resources most people wouldn’t. It was time to plunder the depths of information available on Sykes Investments.

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Mergent Online was helpful; Livy learned quite a bit about Sykes Investments. Articles from Lexus Nexus were even more helpful, filling in the blanks in Livy’s knowledge of the man and his company. Rochester Sykes had built his company from the ground up after a stint with the Bank of America. He had proven himself to be a genius with investments, earning quite a bit of money and making plenty of people happy. Then Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was revealed, and people assumed the same about Sykes. His company had suffered a bad hit as the stock market went down and everyone assumed he was part of a Ponzi scheme as well. Sykes had seen his fortune fall overnight.

And then he rebounded. He choose the right stocks that rose, even in increments, and sold them before they fell again. No one could find fault with him or his money-generating ways. It was like he was a miracle-worker.

Livy chewed on a fingernail. He was too good to be true. Something was wrong here, and she wanted to know what. But she couldn’t find anything wrong here. Sighing, she logged into Reference USA and looked up Sykes Investments. It was a publically traded company, and she started to arrow up through the companies that owned Sykes. There were a number of them; for a man that owned his own company, several other companies owned chunks of it. “Interesting,” Livy muttered, and then drilled down to see what Sykes owned.

He owned parts or entireties of bio-tech companies. At first, Liv didn’t see any issue, but she noted the information anyway. Sighing, she was about to conclude that this was a dead end when a single thought occurred to her: why would someone as fiscally successful as Sykes put all his eggs in one basket?

“Maybe there is something more to this,” she muttered and logged out, thinking.

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