by Cass Sellars
“Yolanda, I—”
“You are stubborn and pissed off. I don’t know all the details, but I know you shut her down in the middle of her wanting to give you the world. You’re pissed, and she’s devastated. If you ever had feelings for her, like what I saw last week between you two, then figure out how to fix it so I can get my girl back.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“The hell it is.”
“With all due respect—”
“You want to explain to me how she overstepped? Don’t bother. That’s Jess. Her heart gets in the way of her brain and she wants everyone in her life to be okay and safe and happy and spoiled, and sometimes she does stupid things because she doesn’t think about them before she leaps off the cliff.” She barely breathed before she started again, holding a finger under her earlobe. “See these? Half a carat worth of diamonds in my ears for some crazy anniversary where she inherited me, and I clung on for dear life.”
“You don’t understand.” Skylar hoped to stop her tirade, which was serving to pull her off her self-righteous platform.
“Maybe not, but I know there isn’t a malicious cell in Jess Ivan’s entire body. She fell hard for you.”
She tried not to seem shocked at the knowledge Yolanda shouldn’t have. “That isn’t always enough.”
“Bullshit. Unless you faked the happy I saw on your face when I delivered you French toast on the floor of that office, then bullshit.” Yolanda turned back to her computer, clearly dismissing her.
Skylar sat quietly until she felt she could walk out without some projectile to the back of her head. She leaned against her closed office door and cried for the person she thought Jess was and who she once thought she could be. Yolanda’s words stung, but she refused to be responsible for a situation that Jess created completely on her own. She didn’t have any ownership in this, did she? Should it have been the best thing that had happened to her? Sure, it should have, but the thing she was missing was never real. She stayed locked in the tiny room until the staff had deserted the building in favor of a prompt beginning to their weekend.
Skylar opened the box marked Operations and set her mind to being consumed finding the answers she knew existed. She was intent on avoiding thoughts of Jess and an unrealistic future.
She studied the files and made meticulous notes. By eight p.m., she sat mesmerized by the data that finally explained every wrong answer she’d been tripping over. Every. Single. One.
* * *
Jess pushed off her father’s chair, which occupied the corner of what would always be his house. She slid her watery drink onto the bar, walked into the shower, and baked her skin under the pounding spray, then mussed her hair into what she felt was presentable for the rude take-out guy who seemed annoyed by his visits and for the cute liquor delivery girl with a stubborn cowlick that formed an unintentional fauxhawk.
She had tried to convince herself that she could be just as effective from the bedroom as she could from the balcony chair, but stale air was trapped in her house. She idly thought it smelled like sour desperation and the remnants of her hopes from a couple of weeks ago.
She had prayed that the new location would cause her to maybe be gratefully swept under by sleep. She thought alcohol would hasten the process. The crystal glass carrying the name of her father only served as a reminder of what she’d thought she would be.
A quiet knock on the front door truncated her walk through the kitchen. She wondered for a moment if she had even heard it and checked her recall for the last to-go orders she had placed. She stood still for a moment and listened to the silence clouding the ancient space.
Two quick knocks echoed through the hall. Jess abandoned her glass on the hall table and opened the door, expecting to find a telemarketer or Dino on a break between women. Instead, Skylar stood on her front step, damp from the evening mist. She was clutching a laptop and a box of her customary color-coded files.
“I found something you have to see. And Yolanda wanted you to have these messages.” Skylar’s voice trembled.
Jess stared at her, not knowing how to react or even if she should. “Okay.” She stepped back and waved her in. She held out her hand and took the message slips wrinkled in Skylar’s fist.
“What do you have?” Skylar’s proximity painfully energized her every cell, mostly because she couldn’t reach out to her, wouldn’t touch her. The pain of any further rejection would be too much. The fact that Skylar wasn’t speaking to her through gritted teeth was a marked improvement, however.
Skylar remained on the hall rug, clutching her belongings as if they were scared children.
“I was looking at the books and going through the boxes and I found something suspicious. I mean more suspicious. I know you probably don’t want to be bothered with it tonight, but it was kind of like pulling a thread and I did it and I wanted to see where it went and by the time I finished it was eight o’clock and I didn’t know if you would be home.” She exhaled loudly, looking as if she suddenly felt the cacophony of emotions colliding in her head. The words had tumbled out in a flood, but at least she wasn’t looking at Jess like she hated her.
Jess tentatively pulled the files from Skylar’s arms and placed them on the back of the sofa. She drew the damp windbreaker from her shoulders and hung it on the hall tree.
“I’m listening.” Jess forced her tone to one she might use to address any random employee, not one she knew she was in love with.
“So, all I could think about was calling you or talking to you. I mean so I could tell you what was going on.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” Jess hoped she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt.
“Me too,” Skylar said weakly.
“Let me get you a drink and you can show me what you found.” Jess was willing to do anything to prolong the first moments of non-combat she and Skylar’d had in days.
Skylar watched quietly as Jess assembled a perfect Sparkling Sky, complete with fresh lemon and a sprig of mint.
She raised her eyebrows at the size of the glass and laughed. She seemed to find some enjoyment in the moment despite her obvious intention to keep Jess at a distance and not to let her in to her private world again.
“If there’s as much alcohol in this as I think there is, I’ll have to call out sick the entirety of next week.”
“Don’t worry, you know the boss.” Jess intended to reiterate Skylar’s continued place at her company despite the past days, but Skylar winced at the words.
“Yes, I do.” She left the implication unaddressed and moved to order files. “Where do you want to do this?” Skylar asked innocently.
“I don’t know, the bar?” Jess said, denying her impulse to make a joke replete with sexual innuendo. She managed to keep her tone and actions as professional as this particular situation would allow while she cleared the bar of take-out cardboard clamshells and Ward’s bags. She studied Skylar as she arranged colored folders and opened them to appropriate places in the stacks.
“So, here’s what I have.” Skylar began looking at pages of notes she pulled from a different folder. “I started looking at the invoices again that I couldn’t match before, remember?”
Jess nodded.
“Continental Supply sold us safety supplies. Even if all forty of us got vests, glasses, and hard hats, we wouldn’t have spent this much. So, I looked at the possibility that we supplied them for a job. Fifty people couldn’t use this much gear, and this particular order happened when the only project we had going was nearly complete. I did as much research as I could, and Continental Supply is kind of like looking up John Smith in the white pages. Everybody uses Universal/Continental/Supply Something. You name it—computer supplies, janitorial, office, safety.
“The setup looked very much like a hundred other businesses. It’s very easy to have an invoice like that go unassigned. You approve it and it slips through the accounts payable cracks. Even though we were sure that we had handled all of
them from this year, I found a ton more.”
Jess watched her mouth move and remembered what it felt like on hers. She fought to return to the business conversation, realizing that it was preferable to being ignored.
“I can tell by the look on your face that you assume no one who works for you would do anything dishonest.”
Jess was briefly grateful that Skylar thought she at least looked like she was paying more attention to her words than the graceful slope of her collarbone.
“And before you ask, no, I haven’t tied this to anyone yet. I do know that the invoices are too frequent to just be mailing scams. Somebody, somewhere would have known this was happening. In fact, they were making it happen.”
“I obviously wasn’t paying nearly enough attention.” Jess scanned through her recall of the Friday nights spent approving invoices and doing cursory checks of what she was sure Brett, Yolanda, and Pam had done in earnest. She wondered if the Friday night Whitney distractions made her even less focused and then felt instantly guilty for blaming any part of this on Whitney. “But Brett will never let me forget this.”
“When I got all the documents together, I pulled a copy of statements from the bank.”
Jess tried not to smile as she watched her whip another page out of a folder like a new attorney trying a difficult case.
“So I started tracking the deposit banks’ routing numbers. You know, the coding on the checks’ final destinations. I started cataloging those just to make sure that I didn’t have to go even further back. I needed to know if these were related for sure. Then I needed to know if someone was misallocating to hide poor job management or lining their own bank account.”
“Makes sense. But why not roll those into another project fund so they would just disappear when the project was closed?” She understood how the invoices were questionable, but she sifted through her employees in her mind and still couldn’t pinpoint one who would perpetrate such a scam against her company. The pain of the past few nights now layered with new emotion. Her stomach roiled with the betrayal and shame of someone close to her stealing.
“Very good question, my dear Jess.” Skylar was too invested in her speech to notice the familiar tone that made Jess’s soul surge with hope. “The pat answer is people are only careful until they stop worrying about getting caught. We hire a general contractor to do all the construction management now, right?”
“Yes, because none of us have the time or the licensure to do that on our own.” Jess realized her defensive tone was a result of feeling like she had been asleep at the wheel of whatever was coming.
“Exactly. So, if we’re paying a GC to manage your projects, then why are we ordering silt fence or hard hats or paying for licenses or permitting fees?”
“Well, all of those things are necessary, but we would or should be paying them as part of the general contractor’s invoice.”
Skylar lifted a finger and pointed it at Jess. “Exactly. So why, over the course of nine years, have we paid out over $97,000 not to our GCs but to random companies that supplied those services or products?”
“We can’t have paid out that much money. Somebody would have noticed. Hell, our bottom line should have noticed.”
“Maybe somebody should have noticed, but what if they, like you, assumed that these are legitimate project expenses? No one is going back and auditing the general contractor’s invoices to see if those things are included. Not unless they were suspicious.” She laid another page on her stack.
“The point here is that nobody did because it was gradual. And they looked legitimate. And here’s why. Look at Continental Supply.” She held up a very generic-looking invoice. “Anyone could have printed this off a Microsoft outline or a Google template. And Universal Office?” She held up another similar invoice. “A different invoice number structure and a very standard list of items that every office manager would purchase at some point in their lifetime.”
She handed the page to Jess, who looked over the generic list of hanging files, ballpoint pens, and manila folders.
Jess was listening seriously while watching Skylar’s mouth form the words that were shattering her world as she believed it was supposed to be. The rancid soup of emotion made from finding and losing Skylar inside of a few weeks and now the betrayal that would make her question the integrity of everyone she had ever employed was bitter.
“And MKZ Landscaping and Blackwood Plumbing and Zephyr Equipment Rental.” She held up series of invoices arranged in a fan and pointed them at her. “What is the threshold for dual signature at IA?”
“Well, anything over $1,000 has to have Yolanda or the project manager’s signature. Over $5,000, two signatures, the project manager and usually I’m the second, in theory.”
“Not one of the old checks needed your signature, Jess. The invoices all have your initials approving them, though. The invoices started out low. Versailles Engineering for $800, Capri Permits for $1,500. If I had been here I would have looked at anything over $800 but I’m a little crazy like that. So, I thought to myself, isn’t it interesting that all these companies and all these invoices, spaced quite far apart, all looked so similar. They were all entered into the same unallocated GL.”
“Clearly, I approved them without noticing they were bogus.” She felt a wave of nausea seize her gut when she realized how careless she had been.
“But you told me you weren’t auditing the expenses, just reviewing the outlay in case it was driving a job over.”
“Right, but clearly that wasn’t enough, assuming I follow where you’re going.”
“You do, and I know you’ll change the process now, but remember that people cheat because they’re greedy. They get away with it because they see a hole. They wait for a vulnerability to be exploitable.”
Jess started to pace, the watery ice cubes clinking in her glass.
“Okay, so who is doing this? These are all different project managers and different companies and projects.” The glass clacked against the quartz counter, and Jess continued to pace without it.
“I saw that, too. So, while we can see where the opportunities were, we have to agree that there were many hands that could have set this up.”
“Great, so someone could be doing this as we speak.”
“No, I’m here now. I check the audit detail before the checks are cut. Nothing is leaving this company unless I say it’s okay.” She sounded fundamentally protective over Ivan Associates because as she had said many times, she believed in it. Jess hoped that one day, she would believe in her again, too.
She caught Jess’s arm mid-pace and steered her onto a barstool. “Look, please.”
Despite the gravity of what she was being told, a flush found her skin where Skylar touched her. She forced herself back into the moment where Skylar was handing her three white 8.5 x 11 invoices. “Look at those.”
“Continental, Blackwood, and Capri. Okay?” Jess glanced from the pages to Skylar.
“Hold them up to the light.” She smiled when Jess looked puzzled. She held one of the invoices over her head toward the kitchen ceiling.
“No, like this.” Skylar stood behind her and held the two documents, one on top of the other. “See the lines and the printing? Exactly the same spacing, position on the page, line where the writing starts, font. See it?”
“Yeah. I see it.” The proximity of Skylar’s body to hers was incapacitating. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, intent on focusing as Skylar wanted her to.
Skylar dropped the Blackwood page and added the Capri invoice. “See again?”
“They’re identical, except the names and item sold are different.” The weighty implication of embezzlement warred against physical, chemical reactions in her head before Skylar continued. She mentally shook off the desire for her and forced herself to focus.
“Same printer, same program, same font and spacing. I’m guessing that’s fairly impossible for companies that are supposedly on opposite ends of the cou
ntry.” Skylar studied Jess’s face, and Jess, for the first time, thought that Skylar might not be all the way gone.
“Whatever all of this means, the upshot is that some opportunistic fucker has coopted my father’s business and stolen money.”
“Yes.” Skylar looked at the papers and squeezed Jess’s arm.
Jess realized the scam could have devastated a company the size of Ivan Associates if it had gone on much longer and Skylar hadn’t found everything.
“But it’s your business. Stop talking about it like you have nothing to do with its success. I know you’re wondering what the next step is.”
Jess nodded and leaned over the documents, feeling a swell of anger.
“So, I looked at the checks we wrote—always checks, mind you, never an ACH or electronic payment.”
“Seems unlikely that none of these companies do business electronically.”
“I agree. But that’s actually good for us, as it turns out.”
Jess looked at her dubiously. Instead of asking questions, she rose, made Skylar another drink, and filled her own glass nearly to the top. She took a grateful gulp and pushed the new glass to Skylar, who sipped it without thinking, fully focused on the next piece of evidence in her arsenal.
“Now, here’s what got weird. We know these supposed companies are all across the country, right?”
Jess nodded and lost the battle to not watch her lips seal around the cocktail straw in her glass.
“Somebody forgot to pay a post office bill.”
“Um, okay. Why do we care?”
“I’m so glad you asked.” Skylar began sifting through another file, producing envelopes from Ivan Associates.
“You know that six months after you move you get a notice that says your forwarding order has expired? They forward the mail with a sticker for a while and then they stop.” Skylar made a slicing motion with her hand for emphasis.
“Okay. So?” Jess felt lost and increasingly stupid.