Lisa Gardner - Touch & Go

Ruth could see where a relatively small check to a relatively minor vendor might get lost in the shuffle. In fact, she was guessing that was the theory behind the crime—rather than defraud a hundred-million-dollar company out of four hundred thousand dollars at once, go after it in drips and drops. Twenty thousand here, fifteen there. While it might sound like a lot of money to some people, for a company of Denbe’s size, those amounts weren’t even rounding errors on most of their projects.

A solid little scam that had slowly but surely been adding up.

Ruth had checked with Denbe Construction’s bank to see if they could tell her anything more about the cleared checks. They could; based on the information stamped on the back, each check had been deposited into an offshore bank account. In the Bahamas.

So the fake vendor billed to a post office box in New Jersey, then deposited Denbe’s checks into an account in the Bahamas. And had been for three years without anyone suspecting a thing.

Four weeks ago, Ruth had waited for Justin to stay late at work. Then, when no one else was around, she’d entered his office and made her case. As she’d expected, he’d been furious, then just plain insulted that someone had dared to steal from him.

Ruth had proposed taking the case straight to the FBI. Offshore accounts were involved, and they would need major investigative guns to demand information from a bank in the Bahamas. Even then, she wasn’t sure what level of cooperation they’d get. Banks were notoriously prickly about releasing a customer’s private information, though rules were finally loosening, thanks to the war on terrorism.

Justin, however, hadn’t wanted to involve the police just yet. Instead, he wanted to bait the perpetrator.

“He asked me to go to the Bahamas. I have the bank account information for DDA, LLC; I got it from our bank. So Friday, I was supposed to walk into the Bahamas bank and close DDA’s account. Take the money and run, I suppose, except it is our money.”

Ruth gazed at them expectantly.

“How can you close out an account that’s not yours?” Tessa asked. “Don’t you have to have signing authority or something?”

“I was going to wing it. Our assumption is that whoever is behind the fraud doesn’t visit in person, right? So just do it. I’m a CFO, I can talk the talk. And Justin wanted the money transferred back to Denbe, which I’m fully authorized to do.”

“He wanted the person who stole from you to know you’d stolen back from them,” Tessa filled in. “Hence the transfer to Denbe.”

“Exactly.”

“Did it work?” Wyatt asked with a frown.

Ruth shook her head. “I was one day too late. The person, the thief , had transferred out all the funds on Thursday. But this is the crazy part: When I told the clerk that the transfer had been a mistake and I wanted to know who’d authorized the transaction, the clerk became very nervous and asked if that meant there was an issue with the other accounts as well. Turns out, whoever set up DDA didn’t have just one account. He or she had fifteen accounts at the bank. For a total of eleven-point-two million dollars.”

“That’s a little bit more than four hundred thousand,” Tessa said blankly.

Ruth had given up on dinner completely. She sat, twisting the stem of her wineglass.

“I called Justin Friday afternoon. I told him the account was closed, that I’d been too late. But I didn’t tell him about the other accounts, the other money. I wasn’t trying to lie or mislead him. It’s just… I already had a suspicion, and in these kinds of situations, you can’t afford to be wrong. I told Justin I needed a couple more days. I’d call him again on Monday.”

“How’d he take it?” Wyatt asked.

Ruth shrugged. “He was frustrated that we’d missed out on reclaiming the money. But…we’d known it was a long shot. And while Justin wasn’t happy that someone had possibly stolen four hundred thousand dollars from his company, that kind of loss, over three years, we could live with it.”

“Except you’re saying the perpetrator had actually accrued eleven-point-two million,” Tessa pressed.

Ruth sighed, dark eyes miserable. “I stayed up all Friday night, all last night. I’ve been poring over contractor lists, project P and Ls, picking out small, random vendors, then Googling them. I’ve found six more that don’t exist. It will take a full forensic audit, easily a good six months of work, but I’m guessing, in the end, all eleven-point-two million came from Denbe Construction. Was stolen from right underneath our noses.”

Tessa’s eyes widened. She could tell Wyatt was equally startled. “Someone scammed eleven million dollars in the past three years? And you’re just now noticing?”

“That’s the thing. The invoices, the fake vendors. The amounts are all so small. In some cases, literally a couple thousand dollars. The kind of payments designed to slip between the cracks.”

“But you said eleven million—”

“Exactly!”

Then, Tessa got it. “You’re not talking about the past three years.”

“No!”

“You’re talking…ten, fifteen?”

“Maybe longer.”

“Twenty?” Now Tessa was definitely caught off guard.

“Predates me,” Ruth said, “so it’s hard to be sure. But some of those years were the company’s biggest. Justin had just taken over, landing three two-hundred-million-dollar builds at once. The amount of billing and invoicing going on, with employees who were overstretched and a computer system that was relatively antiquated. To end up with over eleven million dollars, the embezzler must’ve had at least a couple of big years, and those were the years when you could’ve gotten away with faking very large invoices and no one would be the wiser.”

“Fifteen to twenty years,” Tessa murmured.

“Predates Chris Lopez,” Wyatt said.

“Predates most of us,” Ruth commented. “Except…” She wouldn’t meet their eyes anymore. She picked up her glass, swallowed the last of her wine. Her hand was still trembling, the misery once more etched into her face.

A longtime employee. One who’d have access and authority. Also, by virtue of being one of the only females in a predominantly male business, possibly even a close personal friend of the CFO.

Anita Bennett. Denbe Construction’s current COO and Dale Denbe’s former mistress.

Chapter 34

I DOZED OFF, dreaming of a long hot shower. I stood in my own bathroom, custom glass doors steaming up as I let the hot spray cascade down my naked body. Then, lathering up with my favorite shampoo. Watching thick white suds slide down my arm, chasing away the salt-encrusted itch of my own sweat and grime.

In my dream, I could feel my skin sloughing away, like an exoskeleton to be shed. Prison bars, cinder-block walls, hard concrete floors. I watched their remnants dissolve into a faint gray crumble, then wash down the drain.

If I stopped, looked down the drain, I knew I would see Mick’s face. Radar. Z. They were gone, melted like Dorothy’s Wicked Witch and now spiraling down the bowels of Boston’s sewer system where they belonged.

But I didn’t stop. Didn’t want to look. To seek them out would be to resurrect evil. And this was my dream, my shower. Where the soap smelled liked fresh-picked oranges, and I was no longer in my Back Bay town house, but on a beach in Key West, where I would emerge from the bathroom to find my husband waiting in bed, wearing nothing but cool white sheets tangled around his long, lean body.

Oranges. He would feed me oranges. The promise of pleasure.

The taste of my pain.

My shower changed. The water disappeared. Pills sprayed out instead. Hundreds, thousands of long, oblong tablets. Hydrocodone. My precious painkillers, returning to me. Complete with orange-colored bottles, of course.