The next morning Kay and I returned to Surrey. Kay drove. I sipped from a London Fog that was already lukewarm when we left Vancouver. I didn’t think about Chambers or Qiu. I especially didn’t think about Sonia. Instead I blasted Mad Season’s Above through the van’s cheap speakers and looked out the window at a city I no longer recognized.
In the last decade Surrey had done its level best to rehabilitate itself. It was no longer the car theft capital of Canada. Many of the grimy, gray storefronts had been cleaned up or bulldozed in favor of more reputable franchises. Money had been poured into the city center, and the meth dealers and petty criminals pushed back from the Skytrain stations and bus loops. The Fifties Diner, which on Sundays had hosted Drag Queen Night—gone. Skyscrapers and a brand-new civic center moved in. The major highway had been rechristened King George Boulevard, enough stoplights installed to slow down traffic and give the impression that Surrey could be a destination rather than a waypoint between Vancouver and Seattle.
South of the city center, in a cluster of professional buildings near Bear Creek Park, was the office of Martinez, Burrows & Chatwood, the accounting firm that had performed the forensic audit on Surrey Polytech. Since the school had made the results public, the auditors had agreed to entertain questions, though they regretted they might not be able to answer them.
Kay and I were shown into a small meeting room on the second floor. Large windows provided a dazzling view of sights that didn’t warrant a dazzling view. A coffeemaker burbled.
After eight minutes, a woman joined us, introducing herself as Jaswinder Pahwa. She wore a green double-breasted suit with matching skirt, silver bracelets on her wrists. I put her age around forty.
“Mr. Baker is running a little late,” Pahwa said. “I can perhaps help you with some things.”
“You prepared the audit findings report,” I said. When she nodded: “We’d like to know what didn’t make it into the report.”
“We pride ourselves on being thorough,” she said.
“Not challenging that, only asking if there were other avenues you didn’t have time to explore.” Levelling with her, I said, “Like Tabitha Sorenson.”
“Right,” Pahwa said. She poured a coffee and added various powders to make it white and sweet. She seemed to use the time and the ritualistic movements to decide something.
“What is your concern with Ms. Sorenson?” she asked.
“No one seems to know where she is. I’d like to find her.”
“So this isn’t for legal purposes?”
“Well it’s not for illegal purposes,” I said.
She didn’t smile. “You know what I mean. I can tell you my opinion, but as far as using any of this—”
A man stepped in, offering apologies. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie covered in explosions of orange and green. Hair rimmed his gleaming pate like the petals of a sunflower.
“Ray Baker, senior auditor. You’ve met Jas already.”
His hand patted her shoulder, his thumb over her collar and brushing her neck. He sat down at the head of the oval table. “Don’t let me interrupt, Jas.”
Kay was sitting next to me, but the window occupied her gaze.
“I was just telling them we stood behind the report,” Pahwa said. She stirred her coffee with a metal spoon that made a sandpapery sound as it scraped the edges of the Styrofoam.
“Absolutely,” Baker said. “Wouldn’t put our names on it if we didn’t. Accurate to the best of our abilities.” He tapped a duo-tanged copy of the report. “It’s all in here.”
“Tabitha Sorenson’s not mentioned much.”
Baker looked at Pahwa.
“Interim events coordinator,” she reminded him.
“Right, right. Our feeling was she was on the outskirts. Not a player.”
“Based on what?”
“Lots of various factors.”
“Race?” I asked. No response from Baker. “Only white person on a predominantly South Asian government.”
“If you want to play that game,” Baker said boldly, “you go right ahead. But the fact is, she was appointed after and wasn’t part of the original slate of candidates. She was never issued a cell phone. Never drew a check on her account that wasn’t co-signed, even though Atwal dumped the three-signature rule.” He touched Pahwa’s stockinged knee. “Jas examined her accounts just like the non-whites’. No different treatment. All in the report.”
“Either of you aware that she and Ashwin Dhillon were a couple? Or that they went to high school with the Hayes brothers?”
Both looked suitably startled. Baker’s stray hand went back to rest on the tabletop.
“There are time and budget constraints to every investigation,” he began.
“All I care about is finding Tabitha,” I said. “You investigated her. You must’ve come across something that didn’t make the final draft. Something you couldn’t prove—given your timing and budget constraints.”
“I hope this girl’s all right,” Baker said, “but us sharing unsubstantiated rumors won’t help anyone.”
Kay turned away from the window and said to Pahwa, “Do you mind it when he touches you?”
Flustered, Pahwa said nothing for a moment. Baker looked eager to respond but paused and listened for her response. “I hardly notice,” she finally said.
“She doesn’t like the way you touch her,” Kay said to Baker. “You shouldn’t do that.” And she stormed out.
I’d had a few ruses and end runs planned, but Kay’s speech ruined them all. I lingered a second to see if the interview could be salvaged.
Baker gestured at the open door. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Five minute interview, I’m called a racist and a sexual harasser. Un-god-damn-believable.”
I wanted somehow to reach out to Pahwa, to get back to where we’d been before Baker’s entrance. He wanted me out, and she wasn’t going to fight him. I left them each one of my cards.
In the parking lot Kay leaned against the hood, grinning. I stalked past her to the driver’s side. When we were both inside and I’d slammed my door, I said very, very quietly, “Don’t bring personal shit to an interview. How many times we go over that?”
“Dave, listen—”
“You listen,” I said. “He knows something we need. You want to right wrongs, you do it after we get what we came for. And you never leave a talk so you can’t go back.”
Calming down, I added, “But I understand where you’re coming from. Guy’s a creep, you got emotional. Happens to me sometimes. Don’t make it a habit. Now. Would you like to drive or should I?”
As we were changing seats I saw Jaswinder Pahwa exit the building, spy us, and head in our direction. She was clutching something small in her hand. I rolled down the window.
“I talked to Ms. Sorenson,” Pahwa said. “In that same room. She seemed very withdrawn. But every dollar of every event she oversaw was accounted for. That’s why we excluded her.”
“So nothing amiss?”
“The exactitude. The fact that she could recall those transactions despite the records being removed, and her personal computer suffering a hard drive failure. The interview felt wrong, but the problems we had with the others overshadowed our doubts about Tabitha. My doubts,” Pahwa added.
“Putting the evidence aside, and going on your gut.”
“My feeling is, there were two scandals,” Pahwa said. “Call them above and below ground. Above is flashy and wasteful, taking what it wants, disregarding the paper trail or what might happen later.”
“And below?”
“Quiet, patient, playing her cards—its cards, sorry—close to the vest. Above draws all the attention. Below, no one really sees what she’s doing. By the time they catch on, she’s gone.”
“You’re saying Atwal and the others didn’t suspect what she was up to.”
“Right. The cell phone bills and overpayments, even most of the loans—it’s all amateurish. Spoiled rich kids writing each other unencrypted e-mails on a public server about how they should be careful the next time they take a few thousand. It’s really quite funny.”
“Tell me about the second scandal,” I said.
“From what I reconstructed of the bookkeeping, funds had been transferred between student-government-controlled accounts with no signature. For instance, we found a hundred and sixty thousand dollars of the operating budget dumped into the elections account. That’s in addition to the three hundred and seventy thousand that somehow ended up in the dental fund. Only Inderveer Atwal should have control over large transfers from those accounts, but with no written authorization needed, it’s unclear who moved it. Or when.”
“What’s the significance of when?”
“Well, what if that money was withdrawn and invested for six months and then deliberately misplaced? The accounts would match, more or less, but whoever did that would have access to the interest earned off that money. A hundred and sixty thousand at ten percent would yield eight thousand.”
“Not much,” I said.
“That’s eight thousand that exists nowhere, and isn’t missed, provided the principle is returned. Now say it was more, half a million, and say the person got an exceedingly high rate of return, twenty-five or even thirty percent. That could very quickly add up to something significant.”
“Enough to run away on,” I said.
“Right. If the scope of our audit had gone beyond the student government, who knows what we might have found? As it is, this is speculation.”
“So there could be someone out there with a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Or millions. The right investment, or something less than legal.”
“But you uncovered nothing to prove that.”
Pahwa shook her head. “Ray wasn’t fibbing about deadlines and limitations. The school wanted it done, but done quickly and cheaply. Hopefully your client wants it done right.”
Pahwa reached through the window and passed Kay the black leather wallet my mother had given Kay for her birthday.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Pahwa said to her, smiling. “You put up with male bullshit for so long, you almost forget. Almost.”
She walked back inside. Kay began explaining how she’d left the wallet on purpose, knowing if she insulted Baker it would be Pahwa who’d bring it out to her. “I know it was a gamble but you’re always saying go with your instinct, so I did, and—”
“When you get tired of being right,” I said, “you can drive us to the school. Coffee and apology’s on me.”