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 58
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, 59
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 60
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.
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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.”