So About the Money (41 page)

“This is ridiculous,” she said aloud.
 

The door behind the table revealed a kitchen converted to a break room. It smelled of burnt coffee and microwave popcorn. No surprise there. She stepped through the rear opening and found three closed doors lining a narrow corridor. The middle door opened to an old-fashioned bathroom. She opened the door on the right and stared in horrified surprise. A queen-sized mattress on a platform frame centered the space. Rumpled pillows and tangled sheets swathed the bed. Candles in various stages of disintegration covered ledges and windowsills.
 

Ooh. Ick
.
 

Apparently, she’d found Tim’s love nest.
 

Gross
.

She closed the door, not wanting to know more. If anyone ever needed evidence of Tim’s infidelity, an anonymous tip could suggest a prime location to look for it.
 

With a shudder, she moved to the other end of the hall and wondered what lay behind door number three. If this were a Gothic haunted house, a soundtrack would be playing creepy music and a voice would shout, “Don’t open the door, idiot!”

She turned the knob and again felt the bottom fall from her stomach. An industrial-scale shredder stood in the middle of the room. Several trash bags that held thousands of tiny paper chips slouched against a row of file cabinets.
 

Maybe the shredding was routine housecleaning—Tim getting rid of old files, unneeded project specs.
 

Nothing unusual. Nothing damning.
 

She crossed to the desk and picked up a handful of documents from the pile closest to the shredder. Thumbing through them, she felt no pleasure in being right. If this had been a due diligence with her Seattle M&A team, she’d be congratulating herself. Instead, she stared at documents that represented an $830,000 loan to one of the mystery companies. The stack contained the complete loan package, detailing a series of loans for a project that didn’t exist, as far as she knew.
 

The papers fell from her hands, joining the blizzard of documents.
 

If it had really been a project that went south, the bank would’ve attached any assets inside the corporation, collected whatever it could on the loan, and written off the rest. Tim’s credit rating would’ve taken a hit but business would go on as usual.
 

Instead…he was gambling on a shell game. Trying to cover his tracks…
 

She picked through the papers. More loans. More late notices.
 

At the height of the housing boom, Tim had borrowed money for projects he never planned to build. He’d sucked out the money to other operating companies and sent it—where?

To cover gambling losses? An expensive wife and mistress? Both?

How could you, Tim?

She looked from the papers to the shredder. Clearly the documents were being destroyed, but she couldn’t tell how recently anyone had been in the office. She cast a troubled glance over her shoulder, feeling the quiet as an uneasy presence.

“Screw it.” She was already in trouble if someone walked in and found her there.
 

She poked through the document piles, found key pages and stepped over to the copier. The groan and thump of the paper handler sounded unnaturally loud in the silence of the office. She shot another anxious look at the door.
 

“Shaky ground” barely covered where she stood.
 

Do what you came for
.

She opened the first file cabinet drawer. Haphazard folders contained documents for loans, incorporations. It would take days, weeks, to process it all.

A phone shrilled.

She shrieked, jumped, and dropped the incorporation filing she’d been examining. Her injured palm slammed against the drawer. “Ouch, dammit.”
 

Clutching her sore hand, she spun around. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream. Her gaze darted around the room, searching for the phone. It gave a second blast, then a fax-tone chirped, and another machine spat out a page.
 

She’d already stayed too long. The sensation of hidden, watching eyes grew stronger. Her heart hammered, preparing to run. Maybe JC wasn’t Just Crazy. Maybe he was right and the parking lot incident really wasn’t an accident. Maybe Frank was driving that SUV. He could be waiting for her right outside.
 

Get moving and get out
.
 

With a shudder, she scanned the room. What should she salvage?

She zeroed in on the shredder. Her sore knees complained when she knelt and retrieved the papers scattered around the machine. More default notices. Demands for payment. Intentions to foreclose.
 

Sorting though the mess, she found papers from eight banks and several subprime lenders. She made copies and added the duplicates to her growing pile. The originals drifted back into the snow-bank of deceit. Through it all, the creepy feeling of a stalking presence grew stronger, until tension churned her stomach.
 

Enough
.
 

Even if the rest of the papers disappeared into the maw of the shredder, she had the lenders’ names. The lenders would have originals too.
 

She stuffed her motley collection into her tote bag and reexamined the office. It looked no more disorganized than when she’d arrived. She hoped no one would notice her fleeting presence.
 

In the front room, she peered through the curtains, then reached for the doorknob. On the plus side, no police cars outside with guys ready to arrest her ass. No black SUV lurked down the street. The downside? Her car was parked at the curb right out front.
 

Smooth move
. She’d never make it as a PI.

Anybody looking for her would know exactly where she was, if not what she was doing. Her gaze dropped to her fingers, wrapped around the doorknob.
 

Fingerprints
.
 

She’d left them everywhere.
 

Her hand jerked away from the door. Oh, crap. Fear squeezed her throat, stifled her breathing. What if the banks—
the cops
—found them? Thought she was part of it?

She ran her fingers through her hair, took a deep breath. Panic solved nothing. Be reasonable. Think logically.
 

Okay, she’d left prints. The lines and curlicues didn’t have a time stamp on them. It would’ve been possible or even reasonable for her to be in the satellite office. Especially after Kaylin had given her keys and permission.
Not
finding fingerprints would be even more suspicious. Then again, given the documents she’d handled, she was glad she’d created a timeline, even if it was a tenuous one. She’d much rather be accused of a quasi-legal entry than collusion in the fraud.

Alrighty
. Deal with it and get moving.
 

She pasted on a confident smile and stepped through the front door. Once inside her car, she resisted the overwhelming urge to collapse in the driver’s seat. Instead, she placed the tote bag on the floor, cranked the engine, and eased away from the curb.
 

Long, nerve-wracking minutes later, she powered onto the Interstate and headed back to Richland. She checked her rearview mirror. Nothing behind her but pickup trucks and sport utilities. They all looked the same to her. In eastern Washington, there were thousands of the vehicles. Most were either black or used-to-be-white. The only way to tell them apart was to count the number of soccer kids in the third row, or dogs in the back.
 

Her thoughts returned to the office she’d just left. No wonder Stevens Ventures’ financial statements looked so good. Tim—or maybe Tim and Alex—was borrowing money and inflating income with bogus activity, flushing thousands through the operating companies.
 

The extra employees Lillian had mentioned created compensation expense—and removed the cash. The bank statement for the laundromat—the huge cash flow—shouted at her. There were entries for new equipment, painting, and landscaping, but those could also be bogus expenses to siphon off the excess cash.
 

The credit crunch had ruined the scheme. Inability to obtain new funds must’ve made Tim miss payments on the older loans. One defaulted loan had apparently led to another, a crumbling house of cards. Tim’s numerous companies—both real and bogus—had isolated each other from the deceit and the defaults. With no assets in the borrowing company, the lender would’ve been forced to write off the defaulted note. So far, there had been no pressure on the other operating companies—at least none Tim had admitted. How long would that continue?
 

Tracing the transactions would take weeks, maybe months. Forms. Documents. Deposits. Wire transfers. Checks. And someone had already destroyed huge sections of the paper trail, making it even harder.
 

How deeply was Alex involved? It would be so easy for him to flush cash through the restaurant. Had the whole thing—his personal interest in her, the dates—simply been a ruse? Had he intended to sweep her off her feet to keep her from looking too closely at the company’s finances? Was that why he’d pushed so hard to keep seeing her, even after she’d broken up with him?

And what about Marcy? She must have known about the scheme. In addition to the fictitious employees Marcy had signed up, clearly she’d been the one picking up the mail and helping Tim cover his tracks. Had she been picking up and depositing the sham payroll checks, too? Holly had no idea how involved Marcy had been or her exact role in the fraud. The knowledge still squeezed her heart.
 

Could Tim or Alex have killed Marcy? JC’s comment about the men saving their asses reverberated in her mind. The detective was the one person she could talk to about this—but the last one she should tell.
 

She still had nothing that directly connected either man to Marcy’s murder.

As for the loans, it wasn’t illegal to borrow money. Or to use the proceeds to pay off other debt. But the web of deceit the men had constructed—she shook her head. If not out and out fraud, it was certainly the height of bad management. Then there was the loan package for the nonexistent development. That couldn’t be explained away by incompetence.
 

Holly glanced at the tote bag that concealed the document copies she’d made. She’d have to wait until Monday to contact the lenders. Tim would fire Desert Accounting after he found out what she’d done, but she’d beat him to that punch. She’d type up a resignation letter and hand it to him right after she called the banks.
 

Another realization jolted her. Desert Accounting did the bookkeeping and tax work for Stevens Ventures—compilations, quarterly filings, federal and state taxes, and withholdings. How had she overlooked the obvious? In order to obtain the loans, the lenders would have required audited financial statements. With the bogus companies, she hadn’t done the work, but Tim could’ve used Desert Accounting’s unaudited reports as a starting point.

Photoshopped her signature onto an audit opinion.
 

Implicated her in the whole illegal business.

If she were a guy, she’d be sweating. Instead, her stomach hurt. How much of the fraud had Tim and Alex tried to hide behind Desert Accounting’s skirts?
 

The men could ruin her family.
 

It didn’t matter that they’d hidden whatever scheme they were running from her. If Desert Accounting signed returns for the fraudulent companies, she and her mother were toast. IRS penalties at a minimum. Possible criminal charges. God help them if somehow the lenders had relied on anything her firm prepared.
 

When had it started? As far as she knew, Desert Accounting had audited only one Stevens Ventures operating company last year. Her auditors would’ve found fraud if it had occurred there. She’d found it in the bogus ones without really wanting to.
 

A portion of the tension she carried slid off her shoulders. Tim and maybe Alex could go to hell, but at least they wouldn’t take Desert Accounting with them.
 

She looked in the mirror again. A black SUV closed on her BMW. As far as she could tell, this SUV was both childless and dogless. Dark tinted windows obscured her view of the driver.