The organist sailed into the recessional and Milo took Jenny and Joey by the hands. As they navigated the throng heading for the doors he glanced around, wondering if any of these nicely dressed parishioners had been lusting or torturing in their thoughts. Impressive, how many commandments you could break just sitting in church.
In the parking lot his mother pulled a fluorescent orange flier from beneath the windshield wiper. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re not safe anywhere from advertising.”
In the back seat the twins pretended to gasp in the hot car. Milo glanced at the flier. Valeene Community College wanted students to register for the fall term. “Get the job skills you need! Culinary; Criminal Justice; Nursing; Web Design; Math for Manufacturing; Finance and Accounting.”
Accounting.
He’d blurted out the money laundering theory to Ellie without thinking. Now Milo wondered if Pearce was in fact using The Smokehouse to hide embezzled money. And if Milo could prove it. He folded up the flier. If he hadn’t been so distracted by a pair of changeable hazel eyes he’d have worked this out sooner. He needed a good accountant.
From the community college web site Milo learned that Professor Keyes’ first name was Brian. He did another search, and found a Brian Keyes, age thirty-six, in Onsted.
He called from his room with the door closed.
At first he thought he’d reached a dance club, with loud music that made him think of tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. Milo tried to picture his plump, balding accounting professor dancing to that music but his mind boggled. Then a woman said, “Hello, Barbara Keyes speaking.”
“Could I speak to Professor Keyes, please?”
“Is this a student?” She didn’t sound annoyed, just breathless.
“Yes. I’m sorry to bother him at home but it’s important.”
“You’re not bothering him because he’s not at home. If it’s so important you’d better call him at the college.” She gave him a cell phone number. Another woman’s voice called, “Barb, we need you!”
“Bye now,” Mrs. Keyes said, and hung up.
Milo thought, absently tapping his foot to the calypso beat.
Then he drove out to the community college. The accounting department was in the same building as the library, which was open on Sundays in the summer. He took the elevator up to the quiet faculty hallway. Only one door was open, halfway down the hall. Here he found his teacher eating a burrito from Taco Bell and wearing what looked like the identical faded Hawaiian shirt he’d had on at the pawn shop. His tiny, windowless office was lined with the kind of books Milo’s father had owned.
Milo knocked. Professor Keyes looked up from a computer solitaire game. “Hey there, High School.” Milo had been the only high school student in class, and the college students had alternately teased him and copied his notes. “All grades are final. Too late to complain.”
“I’ll keep the A,” Milo said. “I just wondered if I could ask you a question. Your wife said you were here.”
“Yes, indeed—every Sunday I clear out. You would too if fifteen women were Zumba dancing in your basement.” He waved Milo into the single visitor’s chair, three feet from his own. “Ask away.”
Milo set his backpack beside the chair. The smell of refried beans was very strong. “This is just a hypothetical discussion,” he began. “For a mystery story I’m writing—for an online contest.”
“Hypothetical,” Keyes said placidly, as though accounting students often consulted him about plot ideas.
“Right. Let’s say a person wanted to embezzle a lot of money from a corporation. And this person works in the accounting department, has access to the books. What would be a good way? Specifically.”
Keyes popped the last of his burrito into his mouth. He wadded up the paper wrappers and tossed them into the wastebasket. Finally he swiveled his chair toward Milo. “Lots of ways. What’s this person’s job title?”
“I was thinking of putting him in charge.”
“That’s good. If you make him high enough—the controller or even the president—he’d have access to one of my favorite scams: the Corporate Payroll Tax. You’d be amazed how many companies get away with it.”
A shiver touched Milo’s spine. “I could make him controller.”
“Tell me a little more about your story. How much money does he steal? Over how long a period? And what kind of nerve does this guy have?”
“Uh—a million dollars. Over, let’s say…eighteen months. And he’s got plenty of nerve.”
“If he’s going to steal that much, the company has to be big enough to not miss it, and lax enough to not have proper controls in place. Someplace like…Wolverine Motors.”
“Uh…I never said—”
“You told us last year your father worked there,” Keyes said mildly. “When I called your house after New Year’s to see why you’d missed my first two classes, your mother told me he’d drowned. In my experience, most first novels are autobiographical.”
Dammit. He should have made them badgers. “I’m working at Wolverine myself this summer, in Payroll. That’s where I got the idea. But only the setting is real. The action is made up.”
“Of course.” Keyes waited.
“So let’s say I have this character who dies suddenly. His wife—or maybe his son—finds some accounting books in his office, afterward, about fraud. The son is curious. He didn’t realize his father worked with fraud. He asks someone high up in the company about it, and the High Up guy tells him the father embezzled lots of money, but died before he could be charged. The son is bummed, as you can imagine. But after a while, he starts to wonder. Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe someone else at—at this company was embezzling and it wasn’t his dad at all. Maybe, if the son can find out just how the fraud worked, he can find out the truth about his father.”
Professor Keyes stared off over Milo’s shoulder, his gaze unfocused. The burrito papers in the trash can relaxed with a crinkly rustle.
“What made the son buy the fraud story in the first place?” Keyes said finally. “Was his father the embezzling kind?”
Clearly, his professor could analyze more than balance sheets. “It’s possible. The father has done some gambling. In the past. Plus, the High Up guy showed—shows—the son a kind of restitution schedule offering to pay back the money. In the dad’s handwriting.”
“Ah,” said Keyes. “Nice plot development.”
“Thanks.” Milo unzipped his backpack. “Someone’s going to rob their house the day of the funeral, and the son will find these books on the floor.” He held one out to Keyes. “But in different dust jackets. Like the dad was hiding them.”
Keyes examined each book in turn. “These would help someone design a good scam. Or uncover one.”
“Exactly!” Milo pointed at Keyes as though he’d answered a trick question correctly. “It could go both ways, couldn’t it. Suspense, see. Keep the reader guessing.”
“Yes, it could.” Keyes opened one of the books to a bookmark Milo had inserted. “But you’ve made a note in the margin right here—siphoning off the corporate payroll tax.”
Milo’s eyes met his teacher’s. “That’s not my note.”
Keyes’ face remained bland, but he seemed to go still for a moment. “Shocking, what some people will do in a bookstore. I hope you didn’t pay full price for that. Well, let’s get on with your fraud. You want to know what it takes to keep anyone, including the IRS, from noticing a company isn’t paying its payroll tax. I’ll bet you a month of burritos that Wolverine—sorry, your hero’s company—has paid some payroll tax at some time. The IRS may take forever to track you down, but they’re a lot more likely to notice if you stop paying taxes, than if you just underpay them. So let’s assume there are historical records to study—much more likely. Does Wolverine do its own taxes, do you know? Or does it use a service?”
“It’s done in-house,” Milo said. “I do some of the data entry.”
“That mak
es it easier for an insider to steal. But the company has to keep records. For six years in Michigan, four years for the feds, minimum. Where does your fictional company keep its tax archives?”
Milo rubbed his cheek to remove a streak of dirt that wasn’t there. “In a storage building. Under lock and key.” And he knew whose drawer held the key.
“There you go, then. Get the son into that building,” his teacher said. “There is one other thing you might want to consider. If he discovers that someone’s been shorting the IRS, he could blow the whistle. Anonymously. He could even get part of any money recovered, as a reward. Might be quite a hefty sum.”
Milo could imagine Pearce’s wrath at being audited. It was an attractive picture. “And no one would suspect who blew the whistle?”
“They might, but the IRS won’t tell. Of course, he might not want to keep working there—assuming there even is a company after that.”
“What do you mean, no company?”
“Ah, I see you don’t know how relentless our Internal Revenue Service can be. Even if they’ve missed a giant scam for five years—especially if they’ve missed it—they’ll want their money. By the time late penalties are calculated, plus the late taxes themselves, plus the interest on the taxes AND the penalties—Wolverine Motors could be lucky to afford a toy fire engine.”
Milo forgot to remind him it was a fictional company. “So calling the IRS—would that be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, just to tidy up the farmyard?”
Keyes gave a sudden bark of laughter. “A Wolverine worker might see it that way. The employees would be hurt either way. Hang on, I’ll show you.” He typed rapidly at his keyboard. Milo scooted his chair closer to see as Keyes pulled down a list of bookmarked sites and selected “Best IRS Scams.” “Read this.”
Milo read.
On August 16, 2008, in Baton Rouge, LA, Helen Busheé Page was sentenced to 37 months in prison for failing to pay employment taxes. Page was the co-owner and chief financial officer of Page Industries, Inc., an offshore oilfield fabrication company in Fort McCracken, Louisiana. Page pleaded guilty to one count of willful failure to collect or pay over tax for the fourth quarter of 2002. Court documents revealed that she collected employment taxes from her employees, but filed false Forms 941 that underreported the company’s employment taxes. Page also failed to send the Social Security Administration W-2 Forms for her employees. This meant routine computerized checks could not detect the false Forms 941. If not corrected, hundreds of employees would have received lower social security checks when they retired.
“Get out,” Milo breathed. Of course. That was the way to do it—underpay them, don’t grab it all. And it had taken six years for the law to catch up with Helen Busheé Page. Six years!
Keyes enjoyed his reaction. “What a story that would be for The Valeene Herald, eh?”
Panic rose in Milo. His laugh was a feeble thing. “You bet. But this is just fiction. It isn’t real or—”
“Some people—accounting types, you know, nothing better to do—have thought for years that Wolverine Motors has been uncommonly blessed in its growth. Uncommonly blessed.”
Keyes clicked out of the site and switched off the monitor. When he looked again at Milo his smile had turned into the scowl of someone who’d just remembered he was the official adult in the room.
Uh-oh. Milo shouldered his backpack and quickly edged toward the door. “Maybe when I finish my draft, you could look it over for me. I really appreciate—”
Keyes grabbed a strap of the backpack. Held on. “Your father’s death wasn’t fiction, Milo. Be careful.”
***
Chapter 16
Be careful? Milo had so many things to be careful of he could barely keep track. Be careful of Ellie—don’t notice her too much, don’t tell her too much. Definitely don’t kiss her. Be careful of his mother—don’t remind her that her husband’s death was one big question, especially since she seemed to be coming to terms with her grief. And for God’s sake be careful of Gordon “George” Pearce.
At least Pearce didn’t know he was a Person of Interest to three of the company’s youngest employees. But Valeene was a small world, and Wolverine Motors even smaller; their luck could not last forever.
Tuesday, it broke.
Milo got to work Tuesday morning as usual. He’d settled at his desk and was sorting the invoices Leslie had left for him, when he saw it. Tucked into the bottom tray of the little tower that held his paperwork was a flip-flop with a navy blue and white polka-dot bow.
He glanced around. Amber and J’azzmin were fussing with their coffee, removing their sweaters, doing all their normal time-filling routines before actually performing work. Leslie was bent toward her screen, though she seemed to sense his gaze and threw him an absent smile. No guile there. No trace of the puckered mouth disgust that tended to linger on her face for up to an hour after an encounter with her direct supervisor. No one was watching him slyly, waiting for his reaction.
He examined the shoe below desk level. Even if he hadn’t seen its twin on Ellie’s foot he’d have guessed it was hers—it was the kind of thing she wore to work each day. This one had dirt embedded in the grooves on the bottom. Milo did not need a soil analysis to know the dirt came from the Hickory Trail.
Pearce must have put it here. Late yesterday, or this morning before anyone else arrived. Pearce had chased after Ellie and Zaffer that day in the woods, and must have picked up this shoe. A few days later, Pearce had arrived at The Smokehouse just as Milo and Ellie were leaving. Milo thought back. Yes, Ellie had been standing next to his car in the parking lot, and she’d taken off the wig when Milo rushed out. Pearce must have seen them together—Ellie Farnon and Milo Shoemaker. At his restaurant. That’s when he’d have connected Ellie with the red-headed girl who’d been screaming through his woods earlier in the week, with a boy. Obviously Pearce had put something together. He’d guessed correctly on the girl, incorrectly if he thought the boy in the woods was the same one he’d seen with her outside his restaurant—the Shoemaker kid. But he’d come close enough.
Milo put the flip-flop in his bottom desk drawer. He pulled his adding machine toward him. It was real now, their hunt, in a way it hadn’t been before. Pearce might believe they were just silly teenagers fooling around, or he might actually be worried, but the creepy way he’d left this shoe—for Milo, not for the boss’s daughter—sent a message. Milo didn’t know what message, exactly, but to him it said, hurry up.
Get those tax records. Keyes had drawn him an arrow toward what to do.
All day Milo watched his supervisor the way a hawk might eye a juicy, garrulous mouse. He didn’t go outside for lunch, but gulped his sandwich at his desk. If he couldn’t outwit Leslie Underwood he should just turn in his Slam Matous badge right now.
Besides, he’d decided not to show Ellie the shoe, a resolve easier to keep if he didn’t see her. She disliked Pearce so intensely, she might go thank him for its return, just to annoy him. She was unpredictable. And that was dangerous.
At five minutes to two Leslie shut down her computer and announced she would be at a meeting of all department heads in the auditorium for the next hour. As soon as she wheeled out of earshot, Amber and J’azzmin informed Milo they were taking their coffee break—together, which they all knew was against Leslie’s orders—and would be back at 2:30. He should mind the phones.
Milo gave them a “Don’t think you’re fooling me for a second” look that set them both to cackling, and waited until their laughter died away down the hall. He took the little key from Leslie’s top drawer. With luck he’d be back before all of them. And anyone likely to call Leslie on the phone was probably in her meeting—including Gordon Pearce.
It was even hotter in the storage shed than it had been a month before, but just as dusty and dim. Milo used one of Zaffer’s tiny laser flashlights so he wouldn’t need the overhead lights. As he closed the door behind him, his heart thumped in protest at his
own deviousness.
He flicked the lights once, to verify the layout of the shed. The flashlight’s beam let him pick his way through the filing cabinets that more than ever felt like sentinels faking sleep, waiting to rise up and denounce him, the intruder. I’m not the crook here, he had an urge to tell them.
He ignored the open elevator in favor of the ladder beside it. His feet thudded loudly on the stamped-metal balcony floor. In the Payroll section he shone his light on each cabinet label until he found one bearing dates from three years before. Ellie’s mother had died in February of that year; Pearce had recently been hired. If Milo and Keyes were correct, Wolverine Motors had been a law-abiding, tax-paying corporate citizen until Gordon Pearce came along.
Milo pulled out the files for the first quarter of 2005, labeled neatly in Leslie’s sloping writing. He sat on the balcony floor with his legs sticking over the edge, the flashlight clamped in his mouth, and pored over columns of numbers.
Minutes passed. Sweat trickled down his back. A summary sheet listed the payroll taxes Wolverine paid for the first quarter. In April of 2005 the figure was $996,000. Four times a year, Wolverine Motors ponied up a million dollars to the IRS like a good little corporate citizen. Four million a year, every year. Milo knew from his data entry work that Wolverine’s annual payroll was about $40,000,000. So far, so good.
He studied the summary sheets for the second, third, and fourth quarters. These files had different handwriting on their labels. Milo was not aware of any mass layoffs that had taken place that year; on the contrary, he remembered Wolverine had been hiring. It had been right around then that his father’s old company had closed, and people told Tim to try Wolverine. He’d pretended he would. Milo forced his thoughts back to the task at hand. The company was growing, but the second quarter report indicated the workforce had shrunk by…one-third. Instead of a million dollars in tax, this time they reported $670,000. He shivered from a chill that wasn’t sweat. He pulled out his calculator and verified the other quarterly totals. From the second quarter of that first year until last spring, which was the latest data here, all the taxes were in line with this new, smaller number of workers. But he himself had already processed two payrolls much bigger than this.
Unaccounted For Page 15