She grabbed lunch at a soup and salad bar far from the SFI offices. It was still crowded, but she found a seat at the high counter. She was almost finished when someone at her elbow said quietly, “Heya, Kip.”
It took just a moment to recognize the voice. “Hi, Meena.”
“How ya doing?” Her ex was as quietly handsome as always, thick, brown hair slightly tousled, collar of a crisp white button-up open to show off a simple gold chain against her tanned throat. At the moment there was no sign of the chip on her shoulder labeled Kip Barrett, lousy girlfriend.
“I’m doing great.” It had been nine months, she thought, or maybe more. How quickly they had passed. “How are you?”
“Equally great. It was a surprise to see you out in the daylight.” It sounded a little bitchy, but Meena’s tone wasn’t overly arch.
“I’m actually between appointments.” There was an awkward silence and Kip fumbled for a topic. “How’s your mom?”
“Also great, and I’m not just saying that. Um… I’m getting married. Mom’s over the moon as you can imagine.”
“Oh. Congratulations.”
“My girlfriend has a job waiting in Iowa, so we’re going to settle there and we can get married, so…”
“Sincerely, all my best wishes.” Kip rose to give Meena an awkward hug. “You deserve the best.” And that sure wasn’t me, she added to herself.
“Thank you. I’m glad I ran into you. I think I was mean when I left.”
“Well, I know I was thoughtless.”
“It’s the job,” Meena began, then she raised a hand. “No need to go down that road. It was good to see you.” She walked away without looking back.
Kip finished her salad in an odd funk she knew would pass. But for a few minutes she had visions of a house and a white picket fence and two women living there who made each other their priority. What was wrong with that? Nothing at all. So why didn’t she want it?
There were no answers forthcoming, and she didn’t really have the luxury of time to puzzle about it. That’s right, she told herself, if you keep up this work pace you won’t have time to figure out that you don’t have time to be happy.
She left the cafe and realized she didn’t even recall what she’d eaten. A glance at her watch told her she had just enough time to finish at the two remaining banks.
She finished up at the last bank before its old-fashioned three o’clock closing. At home again she spread out her notes and copies and fired up her laptop. She logged her activity, the documents she’d gained and wrote a quick summary of her impressions to date.
Formalities tended to, she began her real work by comparing the statement copies she’d collected from the banks to the copies attached to the internal reconciliations. She worked on the largest accounts first and noted the dates and codes for any transactions that had been altered before the accounts were reconciled at SFI.
She absentmindedly tore open a frozen low-fat dinner and popped it in the microwave. Her back ached from hunching over the paperwork, so she did jumping jacks to get her blood going. She supposed a grown woman should feel a little silly doing jumping jacks, but it was her own kitchen and she was used to doing as she liked on her own turf.
She ignored the little voice that said she wasn’t getting any younger and before too long, she’d be so set in her ways there wouldn’t be room for anyone else. Her stubborn adherence to her own ways of doing things had been one of the reasons she and Meena had cooled to each other from the moment Meena had moved in. She had tried to change—but, she knew, only to a point.
She devoured the steaming dinner and rewarded her virtuous meal with a bag of M&Ms, sorted by color. She now had a good list—an all-inclusive one she hoped—of the accounts that were missing funds. The doctored bank statements had been changed in two ways: balance summaries changed and electronic funds transfers that had been altered to smaller amounts or obliterated. The statement in her hand was a prime example, and she hoped represented the thief’s methodology. On the 5th, 13th, 21st and 28th days of every month there were standing withdrawals from several sweep accounts, bringing money into the account. She could then trace the money out to payroll accounts in New York, Illinois and California. Standard stuff.
But last month the very next transaction after each authorized one she couldn’t trace to its landing place—the amount in question disappeared to a destination not listed in SFI’s general asset ledger. The amounts varied and weren’t singly very large. They added up, though.
If she had to guess—and she didn’t like guessing—their thief had appended additional instructions to the existing, already approved withdrawal demand, then made sure the transactions weren’t discovered during account reconciliation. It could be one person doing both. It could be one or more people at SFI—someone with the authority to sign a transaction order that would fool the bank, and someone with ready access to the account statements.
It was time for ETO. Time to eliminate the obvious hows and whos.
She typed in her list of signatories for each account, then sorted by last name. The list of people who were signatories on every affected sweep account was short—only four. It should be simple to eliminate them as suspects who acted alone, at least. If she cleared them all, it meant focusing on the next most obvious how and who: any of these people working together or with an accomplice she didn’t yet have on a suspect list.
ETO number one was Tamara Rebekkah Sterling. She privately owned SFI as a limited liability corporation of which she was the only shareholder. All net worth was her personal asset and she could draw any amount she liked from several company accounts and need not pay it back. Of course the IRS would want her to pay taxes on the income, but the money was hers. But she couldn’t touch the pension accounts for her personal use. Why would she? There was plenty of cash elsewhere and easily hers with a signed check. Why steal it?
Well, her devil’s advocate argued, to get it tax free, or to possibly recover an insurance payoff in its place. She’d seen that plenty of times. But she had no inkling that SFI—or Sterling—needed a cash infusion. Corporate fraud investigation was a growth industry.
Ted Langhorn was next on her list. Along with the other suspects, Ted was a member of the operating board. The directors were all employees in charge of various areas of responsibility.
Langhorn’s responsibility was client development. He had a small staff, of which he was the most visible. SFI didn’t advertise, but Ted Langhorn attended conferences and symposiums and often taught small how-to-spot-fraud seminars for senior managers. The job required charm, intelligence and the ability to stand endlessly at cocktail parties, smiling and appearing to enjoy any and all topics of discussion. Kip lasted about ten minutes at “networking” events, so she admired Ted Langhorn’s ability to make small talk. He certainly brought in the clients.
Running into him outside Tamara’s office was the first time she’d been that close to him, but she had spent several minutes talking to his wife at the last company picnic. Nadia Langhorn was as cool as Ted was warm. She’d chatted politely, looking impossibly elegant in a simple white linen shirt and jeans. Her perfect tan was visible through a fashionable rip in her jeans high on the outside of one thigh. It was chic, but Kip couldn’t help thinking they were suited to a woman ten years younger. There was also one tidbit of office gossip, that before she’d married Ted, Nadia and Tamara Sterling had been an item.
Next up, Cary Innes was in charge of finance, and that put her ahead of Ted on the list, but right behind Tamara. Cary had the final say on where the pension funds were invested. She would be intimately involved in balance management. She was relatively new to SFI, having been hired away from a client. Perhaps as a new employee she’d seen opportunities to steal that established employees might miss, such as a weakness in their banking protocol software. Innes also reviewed the bank statements for the largest accounts, but in keeping with their internal controls, she didn’t review reconciliations for accounts where she had signatory authority.
Because Innes had access, most of her work was conducted in a fish bowl and her authority was heavily constrained. Multiple reviews of her signed agreements, no authority to authorize even petty cash and so on. Everything she signed was reviewed by a senior staff member—they were fraud investigators and knew how to control their assets. That was why embezzlement at SFI looked so bad. If anyone should be able to prevent it, it was them.
After Innes came Diane Morales, who managed the offices in California and Illinois. She had been with SFI since its founding, one of the first managers Tamara had brought on. She was a busy woman who traveled a great deal. For that alone, Kip ruled her out as a suspect acting on her own. Or would be able to if she could get a record of when Diane’s ID card had been swiped at the Seattle office. It just didn’t seem as if Diane could count on being in Seattle at the precise times she needed to be to do the statement doctoring.
Her laptop’s drive whirring, she used her SFI login at a private credit reporting agency and pulled credit, driving and employment histories on her four suspects. Embezzlers were invariably neck deep in debt. As their debts piled up, they blamed their inadequate salaries which became “justification” to steal from their employer. She’d heard the excuses often enough. She dished herself some blackberry sorbet while her printer chunked out the reports.
For each of her suspects she learned physical characteristics, marital status, names of all dependents, automobile license numbers, driving records, home address and phone, schools they’d claimed they’d attended, their largest creditor payments and their full credit history right down to the names of the banks they dealt with. No matter that she often relied on gathering information this way, the availability of all that data so quickly and so cheaply was disconcerting. Her scruples were mollified by the fact that she was looking for a thief and that she was responsible with the information she collected.
She started to read Tamara’s profile, but the letters literally danced in front of her eyes. She used what was left of her concentration to update her work log with her findings to date and to back up all her computer files quickly onto a thumb drive.
It had been a long day, and she couldn’t help but feel that she wasn’t really getting anywhere. This job was difficult working alone. A team would have probably singled out a prime suspect by now. It wasn’t that uncommon for SFI to open and close a case in forty-eight hours. She couldn’t call in sick again tomorrow without a real malady to show Emilio, so she’d need another long stint tomorrow night before she was ready to make a coherent report.
As she settled into bed, she recalled that she was to report to Tamara Wednesday evening. It should have made her anxious, but instead she slipped into welcome sleep.
* * *
“I want your office,” Diane said as she closed Tam’s office door behind her. “You can work somewhere else.”
Tam grinned as she rose to give Diane a welcoming hug. “Sorry I couldn’t join you for lunch. I had to get back.”
“Sure you did.” Diane’s tone was dry. “That shiner is turning purple.”
Tam retreated to her chair, still grateful that Diane hadn’t realized that Tam had been talking to Kip when she’d waved from across the street. “Don’t ask.”
“As if. When Mercedes sent me in she told me not to ask too.”
“It was an accident. Really.” She hoped Diane would let it go. Their friendship went back to just before she’d left the Feds to open SFI. Diane had been briefly under investigation by Tam’s unit. She was exonerated, but they remembered each other when they’d found themselves waiting in the same airline boarding area. That conversation had led to a wonderful, positive collaboration.
She patted the bruise. “Someday I will tell you all about it, I promise. Mercedes isn’t speaking to me because I won’t spill the story.”
Diane dropped into a guest chair and stretched her legs. “I suppose I can wait. Just not too long. I’d drag it out of you, but there’s this to go over.” She boosted her briefcase onto the desk. “I’ve got two final reports. Mercedes gave me two more.” She pursed her lips. “But first, we need to talk about something Hank faxed me. He wasn’t sure you’d want Mercedes to see it.” She handed Tam a memo on the New York office director’s stationery.
Tam glanced through the contents as Diane continued, “He said you would make sense of it for me.”
Hank wrote that he was getting a polite “Your services aren’t needed” when he followed up on the mysterious meeting cancellation on Saturday morning. Since then, two meetings with clients in the final stages of contract approval had been canceled. Looking back, Hank had also found a pattern among NY clients. The cancellations for himself and his own staff had started as long as three weeks ago.
Diane listened to the account of the New York fiasco, then said, “I’ll ask Eric in Los Angeles and Melanie in Chicago to keep an eye out for anything like this happening. I’ll take care of San Francisco myself. First thing when I get back there on Wednesday morning.”
“If there’s a wide pattern you know what that means, don’t you?”
Diane nodded. “A rumor. A rumor that SFI has troubles.”
Tam could only agree. She wanted in the worst way to tell Diane about the embezzlement—it even seemed likely there was a correlation, though at the moment she couldn’t see what it might be. But it was more important she tell Kip Barrett about the situation, because that would make the embezzlement possibly the part of a larger plan, and greed not the only motive.
As she and Diane discussed the reports and caseloads in the regional offices a part of Tam’s brain was spinning in overtime. Who? Why? And how soon before some kind of rumor surfaced in business trades?
A cocktail party fundraiser was the last way she wanted to spend her evening, but incurring Nadia’s wrath was something she didn’t need to do right now. She really had no choice but to settle down to working on reports with Diane, going to the silly party and trusting that Kip Barrett was making headway.