by Dale Mayer
The sheriff’s back went up. “I can’t have you harassing Brenda.”
“How about I start harassing the rest of her family? Like maybe Slim or that useless kid Burgess who’s attacking young women.”
“You’re opening your mouth about an awful lot of local people here, people who are highly respected. And, if an attack has happened, I haven’t heard about it.”
“And involving a lot of people who aren’t so highly respected, I guess,” Carter said. “Like maybe people around here don’t trust you.”
The sheriff’s mouth slowly closed at that. He turned to look at Gordon and Hailey. He didn’t look pleased about any of it. “This is a really bad time to be stirring up hornets.”
“There’s never a good time,” Carter said, “unless you catch it right when the hornets are building their nest.”
“Well, that time’s long past around here.” The sheriff slapped the counter. “I’ll be going now.” He turned and walked away.
Carter looked at Hailey. “Well, that went well.”
“No,” she said. “He gets leaned on by the Longfellows pretty heavily.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but, when it comes to the law, he’s got to stay legal. To hell with keeping the Longfellows happy.”
“I know,” she said. “But, like Gordon has told you before, we already have land dispute issues. And we know it’s one of them too.”
“Have you got anybody to help you guys?”
Gordon puffed up in an instant. “We don’t need any help.”
Carter snorted. “Get off your high horse. If there’s a time to have somebody behind you in a battle, it’s now.”
“We don’t have the money for that kind of battle,” Hailey said. “And I can’t help but think the Longfellows are behind these murders too.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that makes my stomach churn.”
“Because of Slim?” Gordon asked.
“Maybe. I just have a shitty feeling about it all.”
“Well, with any luck, the sheriff does know what he’s doing, and he will take care of things,” Gordon said. “Carter, I know you feel very much like he doesn’t care, but I think he does. Phil and Betty were good friends of his.”
Hailey stopped and looked at him. “Yes, I forgot about that.”
Chapter 5
The next several days passed in a blur. Hailey was sure everybody was looking at her and muttering behind her back. The company had been given access to their building, and the business was carrying on, except it was just hellish for her. She had triple sets of workloads to sort out, and nothing was easy about any of it. Every partner had their own system and was in charge of one-third of the employees, and then every employee had their own way of doing things. Fred and Phil had had systems that were not her way of doing things. Two days later she looked up to find Carter walking into her office. She glared at him.
He held up his hands. “I come in peace.”
She shook her head. “With you, it’s never that way.”
“Why don’t we bury the hatchet?” He sat in the visitor’s seat in her office. “Tell me if there’s something I can do to help.”
Her instinctive answer was to order him out or to mock his ability. But then she remembered his background in finance and what Gordon had said earlier. “How much finance do you remember?”
“I never got out of it,” he said. “Even when I was in the military, I was always involved in investments. But I’m still not part of your world here. I don’t exactly know what you do, I guess.”
“Investments,” she said simply. “We handle various people’s accounts. We’re not accountants in terms of income tax, but we run a lot of books for people. But that’s not our main focus. We handle the financial investments for several hundred companies.”
“How big is your portfolio?”
She hesitated and then nodded. “Over $450 million.”
His eyebrows shot toward his hairline, and he sagged back. “Wow. You guys have done well then.”
“We’ve lost two companies since Fred and Phil were killed,” she said, looking down at the paperwork on her desk. “I’m afraid a flood more are to follow.”
“Did they say why?”
“One did because they’ve worked with Fred since forever and didn’t trust anybody else. The other one didn’t give an answer.”
“You have to expect a certain amount of fallout after something like this. Trust is massive.”
She nodded. “I need to sort out everything they were working on. Each of us has our own secretary, and I’ve got stacks of folders I’m supposed to be going through, alongside work in progress, so it’s just a little too much.”
“Did you even come home last night?”
“I did,” she said, “but not until about eleven.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
“I don’t know how or what. So much work is here that I don’t know how to get somebody else to give me a hand.” Her voice dropped when she said, “And I’m not sure who I can trust either.”
Carter looked at the stacks of files behind her. “What if I took one of the partner’s stacks? Whichever one is the most important, then I’ll shuffle it in a priority list of what has to be done.”
“Their secretaries tried to do that. I don’t know how successfully exactly, but it’s …” She trailed off. “The problem is, I probably need to bring in another junior partner or at least an assistant to help. I just don’t know anybody I trust in my own business.”
“And that’s the bottom line again, right? So let me ask you this. Do you trust your brother?”
Her head bobbed. “Of course.”
“Do you trust me?”
Instinctively she already knew the answer was a yes. “Yes, but you don’t know these people or these accounts.”
“So? You deal in finance, getting returns, regardless of the people who are your clients or the vehicles used to gain earnings.” He turned and saw a small desk with a worn spot in the middle of its tabletop. She probably used to keep a printer there. “Why don’t I sit here, while you give me a bunch of priority folders from one of the partners? Let me take a look.”
She frowned, and he frowned right back. “I’d have to give you log-ins and such. Security is a big issue. I can’t just give you carte blanche access.”
“You’ll have to give someone access,” he said simply. “I’ll take a laptop. Maybe one of the partners’?”
Hailey shook her head. “Both have been seized by the sheriff.”
“Good. At least he’s checking things like that. And he is bound to confidentiality, correct?”
“We locked out all access to the clients’ files. I’ve shut down both partners’ emails and locked them up so nobody can send to or from as well.”
“Perfect,” Carter said. “Put me in as a new person then. As a consultant. With my own password to track my online work. Give me access to one partner’s files.” She hesitated, but he stared at her calmly. “You need help, and you need it now.”
Frustrated, she opened her networking admin profile and gave him an account and an email, then set him up as a consultant. “This gives you limited access,” she said. She glanced at a stack of files. “I’ve got five files of Phil’s here. They were supposed to be next, but I just haven’t gotten there yet.”
“Not a problem,” Carter said. He grabbed the stack and carried it back. “Let me take a look. Do we know what we’re supposed to be looking for?”
“I printed off some of his emails and added them into each of the folders, so I had an idea of what the conversations were regarding the companies at the time.”
“Great. Let me start reading those in the files.”
Hailey pulled out one of her other laptops. She always kept a spare, multiples even. She opened it up, updated it, logged in with Carter’s new email and set him up with a password. After that, she handed it to him and wrote down the password on a sticky
note beside it. “I want you to keep using this one so I can track what you’re doing.”
“Good enough,” he said. He was already distracted and quickly opened up the topmost company file.
Hailey watched him with her mouth open, wondering if she should ask him a question about his financial skills. After a while, she decided it was probably better to just leave him be. She didn’t know what he knew, and this was a good way to find out. She needed help, no doubt about that. Nobody among the employees could move up to account manager. She had junior managers, but these were the senior accounts, and, because she had already found a problem earlier, she couldn’t let anybody else in. And, if something here was connected to the murders, she didn’t want anybody else to have access to that information either.
If Carter found something, that was a different story. Because, of all the people she knew, he was the one who could handle himself in the finance world. Even against a potential murderer. Gordon could handle the ranch just fine, and, when it came to a fistfight, would be the first one to throw a punch as needed, but, when it came to taking down an entire cavalry? She put her money on Carter. She dropped back in to study the massive work on her desk, until her phone rang.
She checked it and smiled. “Hey, Debbie. How are you doing?” She lifted her gaze and caught sight of Carter. She frowned at him, but he wasn’t even looking at her.
“I heard you stopped in the other day, and I wasn’t there,” Debbie said.
“I stop in every once in a while, but you weren’t there the last time, so I just carried on.”
“Apparently somebody else stopped in to see me though, while I was out,” Debbie said, her voice lightly probing. “Carter.”
“Oh, did he?”
Hailey continued staring at Carter, but he still wasn’t paying her any attention. “He’s visiting the ranch for a few days, yes.”
“Is he okay?” Debbie asked. “He took such a major hit that I was afraid he wouldn’t pull through.”
“He’s actually in my office, giving me a hand right now.”
“I heard about Fred,” Debbie said. Her tone turned into that of grief. “He was a very nice old man. I’m so sorry he thought he needed to take his own life.”
Hailey scrunched up her face, hating to lie. “It’s been tough around here. How are you doing?”
A strange hesitation came before Debbie answered. “Awful.”
Hailey sagged in her chair. “In what way?”
“I miss the ranch. I miss you, and I miss Gordon.”
“Can you find your way back?” Hailey asked gently, wanting to give her brother a swift boot for what he’d done. Debbie was a sweetheart.
“We have such a major problem,” she said. “I don’t know if I can go back to what we were, and I don’t think he’s ready to move forward.”
Hailey could say nothing to that because it was the truth. Her brother was stuck in a lot of his old ways. “Just give him some time. I know he’s miserable too.”
“Is he?” Debbie asked hopefully. “That stupid man. I’ve loved him since forever.”
“And you know the feeling’s mutual.”
“I know,” Debbie said sadly. “But why is it that I can’t live with somebody I love?” And just like that, she rang off.
Sad and torn, Hailey set her cell phone on the desk beside her. As she looked up this time, Carter studied her. She shrugged. “Debbie. She’s miserable without Gordon, and Gordon’s miserable without her.”
Carter nodded. “I tried to get him to talk to her. I don’t know if it did any good.”
That surprised her. “You like Debbie, don’t you?”
“More than that, I know Gordon’s lost without her. They’re really a perfect match. But sometimes your brother’s a bit of a stick in the mud, and he doesn’t see what he’s got until he’s lost it.”
She smiled. “Exactly.” She looked at the paperwork in front of her. She almost growled with frustration. “So many transactions are in just this one folder alone. I don’t even understand how or why.”
“If you’re suspecting something underhanded and if it’s over your head—and, no, I’m not saying it is—you can always get a forensic accounting audit done.”
She looked up at him, startled. “What would that do?”
“They’ll go back through the accounts to see if somebody has embezzled money or is running double books or cheating.”
“Who do you know who does that?”
He settled back. “Me, for one.”
She just stared at him.
“I kept my hand in investing, but I also started looking into company books as part of the military work I did. I found one problem when I was in one of my departments. I wasn’t supposed to even have access to it. I went to one of the commanders, and, after that, I started working on other things and slowly did some private stuff for friends and companies. So, I was thinking about setting up something here like that.”
“Titanium Corp,” Hailey said. “Is that what you did for them?”
“No, but I could if they had that kind of work. I did carpentry and odd jobs for them. I thought I would set up a construction company and build houses.” Carter grinned. “I do love the feel of a hammer in my hands, but delving into this kind of stuff and finding where people are trying to cheat is fascinating.”
“Is that something you think you can handle?”
He eyed her steadily. “Do you think something’s going on?”
She nodded and pulled out the two pieces of paper she had given copies of to the sheriff. She handed them to Carter. “I found these in the photocopier a few days before Fred was found dead.”
He studied them carefully. “You know what companies these are from?”
“No. I’ve been trying to locate these particular ledgers. I have a search set up any time I open a file, but, so far, it hasn’t pinged.”
“When you find it, let me know,” he said, “because this is bad news.”
“I know. I wondered how much of it is related to the deaths.”
“We can’t discount it,” he said, “because, as soon as you find embezzlement, you get fraud, then you get tax evasion, and you get people facing jail time. Things can get really ugly, really fast. That’s the last thing we need.”
“I know. I told the sheriff about it because I wanted to make sure he knew some problems existed in the company before the killings, and I was just starting to investigate.”
“Good. It’s always better to be honest about things like that.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, “but I’m still struggling.”
“And now that I have an idea what we’re looking for, more than normal trades and investments, I can help with that too. I wrote a couple programs that help me track entries across ledgers. I can set up something like that on this laptop.”
Carter wondered if he should have offered his help. He wasn’t a professional, but he had a knack for it. Still he wasn’t a pro. He liked working with his hands and, therefore, took a great deal of pleasure in hammering and pounding and doing woodwork. But the challenge of the mental stimulation in doing this kind of work was something that was plain fun to him. The fact that a couple murders had already occurred and potentially something real nasty was going on even deeper added to the mystery.
That Hailey was involved was something much more dangerous yet again. Gordon would be destroyed if something happened to his sister. Carter wished he had come back a couple years ago now because maybe Gordon and Debbie wouldn’t have broken up and maybe Hailey wouldn’t be quite so embittered by whatever was going on.
As he had been worrying about healing himself, he hadn’t thought about the impact and the positive effect he could have had on others. He had only seen the negatives—like how he would have required more assistance, how he would have been a burden, and how he couldn’t have helped out as he normally would have at the ranch.
Now he remembered how well he and Debbie had gotten along and
how he had helped to ease some of the difficulties she had had with Gordon even back then. If Gordon didn’t get that message soon, he wouldn’t have an opportunity to fix things with Debbie. She was a sweetheart, but she wanted one thing in her life, and that was a big family. Carter could well understand she’d leave Gordon to find somebody who could give her what she wanted. The desire for children shouldn’t overtake a marriage, but he could see it happening in this case, what with Gordon’s potential straying already fracturing the trust she had in her own husband.
Carter accessed some of his programs and downloaded one on this temporary laptop. It was a pretty simple software program, but it would show him how many times each of the entries had been changed and shifted. It would show keystrokes and multiple users alongside its history. He set it up to work and leaned back. Then, getting stiff, he stood and stretched his arms overhead. After that, he rotated his neck to loosen his shoulders. Hailey didn’t even notice as he shifted.
She was busy chewing on her bottom lip, her gaze locked on her computer, and yet she typed with her left hand on the number keypad while she wrote with a pencil using her right hand. It was fascinating. Talk about a split-brain operation. This was multitasking to a whole new level. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody do that before. He wanted to take a video of it but didn’t want Hailey to think he was prying.
However, he knew, if he ever posted that on the internet, the world would go crazy. He brought out his phone and taped about thirty seconds of her working with both hands at the same time. He was careful not to show anything on the screen aside from the keyboard and the pad of paper, and nothing of her features either. Then he put it down and smiled.
“What were you just doing?” she asked. Her gaze didn’t lift from the screen.
“I’ve never seen anybody type and write at the same time.”