They needed to finish that conversation, and she wasn’t doing it over the phone.
Five minutes after she pulled back onto the highway, she noticed a black SUV. It seemed to be keeping pace with her car. One thing the ordeal with Frank had taught her was to watch her back—and notice when a car was following her.
You aren’t being paranoid if someone really is after you.
She gave the SUV another glance. Even at her reduced speed, it hung behind her.
It was official. JC and/or Frank Phalen had made her totally paranoid.
She watched the vehicle in the rear view mirror. Her thumb drifted to the cruise-control lever. She couldn’t speed up with the shaky tire. After a momentary hesitation, she tapped the control to decelerate and slowed the BMW.
The sedan behind her swung into the passing lane. The SUV stayed back. A tendril of concern eased up her spine before she nipped the invader. Her exit was coming up. It’d be easy enough to prove the black vehicle wasn’t following her.
The Prosser exit arrived. She watched the SUV as she eased into the turn lane. It slowed, as if its driver might also exit. Eyes riveted to the rearview mirror, she coasted down the off-ramp. The black vehicle accelerated and continued on the Interstate.
She gave a small sigh of relief. Paranoia was so tiring.
Within minutes, she reached the post office and found the short row of mailboxes. Maybe it was Marcy’s personal box. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Stevens Ventures. She poked the key into the lock and twisted.
The lock didn’t turn.
Wrong box.
Damn.
Same results in Moxee, Grandview, and Sunnyside.
She struck pay dirt in Granger. The mailbox was packed with late notices, some forwarded from another box in Ellensburg, others mailed directly to the overstuffed Granger box.
Rather than stand in the post office and shuffle through envelopes branded with bright red last-notice and past-due warnings, she pushed the stack back into the mailbox.
Okay, now she knew where the box was. And that apparently nobody was cleaning it out.
Pocketing the keys, she walked to her car as though she knew what she was doing.
Now she had to figure out a way to make JC trip over this information, so the police could actually use it.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Holly’s conscience walked on the legal side of the law. Breaking into Tim’s office was a bad idea.
But she wasn’t breaking in.
Tim didn’t say she could have the keys, her conscience argued.
But his employee had given them to her, fully understanding she intended to go through the files, because Kaylin didn’t want to do it herself.
Slippery slope.
Perfectly legal. She had keys. She had permission.
So why was she sitting here arguing with herself?
She climbed from the BMW and strode toward the small house Tim used as a satellite office. Eyes front. Act like you’re supposed to be here.
Traffic was light on this side street, but who knew if nosy neighbors were already reporting a prowler…
She stood in front of the locked entrance. Her heart thumped in her ears. What if Tim had an alarm system? Hesitating made her look more suspicious, so she swiftly unlocked the door and stepped inside.
No loud claxon clamored. She scanned the small room. No keypad beside the entrance. No metal box in the corner with a blinking red light. She drew in a ragged breath. Good. No obvious alarm.
Light filtered through the dusty, open-weave curtains. What looked like a cheap dinette set stood on the right—oak-toned chairs around a spindle table—with a closed door beyond it. Sofa on the left. Desk in the corner. An open doorway opposite her.
“Hello?”
No answer.
The silence felt not so much empty as…waiting.
Halfway across the room she realized she was doing the burglar creep—one silent foot in front of the other, with the cartoonish body-lurch in time to the steps.
“This is ridiculous,” she said aloud.
The door behind the table revealed a kitchen converted to a break room. 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 the police 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 it 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 project that didn’t exist, as far as she knew.
She picked through the papers. More loans. More late notices.
The papers fell from her hands, joining the blizzard.
Fraud. Pure and simple.
At the height of the housing boom, Tim had borrowed money for projects he never planned to build. He 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 to shred papers and found her here.
She 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 machi
ne. 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 around the shredder.
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 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.
Crap. She’d left them everywhere.
Okay, so 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 office at some point. Especially after Kaylin had given her permission. Not finding them here would be even more suspicious. Then again, given the documents she’d handled, she was sorta glad there was 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. 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 rear view 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’s 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 recent 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. 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? 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 scheme. The knowledge 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 had not been doing 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 as the preparer, 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 been occurring 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 trailed her BMW. As far as she could tell, this black SUV was both childless and dogless. The grill of the SUV loomed large in her mirror. Her Beemer jumped as the larger vehicle jammed her bumper. Her head snapped through a whiplash crack.
“What the hell?” She slapped both hands onto the wheel, ignoring the spike of pain from her injured palm. The BMW fishtailed, then straightened.
With a quick location check on the SUV—still behind her—she released the wheel long enough to tap the Bluetooth. “911.”
Silence.
“Dammit!” She’d never programmed the emergency operator into her voice contact list.
No way could she take her hands off the wheel to punch in the emergency code.
She floored the accelerator, begging every horse under the BMW’s hood to run like hellhounds were after them. She’d kiss any highway patrolman who stopped her for speeding. “Go, car!”
Her gaze darted between the road and the mirror. The exit for the Port of Benton was just ahead. Other than the closed Desert Wind tasting room, there was no obvious sanctuary near the off-ramp. If she could make it to Gibbons, the busy truck stop there offered people and buildings.
The front end of the Beemer shimmed. She eased up on the accelerator and fought for control.
Where was the SUV?
She checked the mirrors.
There.
Gaining on her.
Beside her.
> Another neck-cracking, heart-stopping, slam.
The BMW jumped sideways. She torqued the wheel, turned into the spin, and resisted the urge to stomp her brakes.
The front end shook, the damaged tire unforgiving. The car straightened, then slid in the opposite direction.
Time slowed. Discrete images appeared in her window. A road sign flashed past. A car horn blared.
Frightened faces at a window.
Squeal of brakes. Rocks. Sagebrush.
Snapshots of disaster.
The car spun across the median and into oncoming traffic.
An air horn blasted.
Holly closed her eyes, braced for a losing battle with the oncoming 18-wheeler.
Chapter Forty
Holly opened her eyes, intensely aware of the quiet.
She stared straight ahead, afraid to move.
Barren brown hills, wrinkled by erosion, filled the visible horizon. This wasn’t how she’d envisioned heaven.
Small noises intruded. Creak and tick of metal. Traffic that sounded far, far away. She squinted against the afternoon light. Her sunglasses were gone and her nose throbbed. The Beemer’s air bags dangled from the door frame and flopped across her steering wheel like a spent condom. Tiny squares of blue-tinted safety glass littered her lap.
“Holly.”
She turned her head and recoiled. Frank Phalen stood beside her door. It wasn’t heaven, it was hell.
He reached through the empty window frame. “You’re bleeding.”
She screamed and jerked away. “Don’t touch me.” She fumbled with her seatbelt, dislodging glass and airbag powder.
She scrambled across the console to the passenger seat. ”Get away. You tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t try…I’d never hurt you.”
Since when? Her panicked brain ping-ponged between options. Stay? Run? Safer in the car?
“I’m trying to protect you—don’t go to that house in Yakima again.”
“What? You’re following me?” How long has that been going on? “You can’t do that.”
His hand slashed sideways, impatient. “Marcy went there to meet that guy. Stevens. Don’t get involved with him.”
For Love of Money Page 26