Building Billions - Part 2

by Lexy Timms

  “Do you have any idea who L.R. could be? It’s not a username I recognize from anyone in the Accounting department over the past four years.”

  “I have no idea. I have some things I could take a look at myself, but nothing immediately comes to mind.”

  “Do you think Ross might know?”

  “You could ask him, but I doubt it.”

  I looked down into Ashley’s big green eyes, but my nerves weren’t abating. Twenty million dollars was a serious amount of money. I had to figure out where the hell that money was going. I had to figure out who the fuck was stealing from my company. I understood why Nina was Ashley’s first suspect, but if this had been going on for years, Nina wasn’t a possibility. She’d only been in my life for two years, and though she was a conniving bitch, she wasn’t smart enough to orchestrate something like this.

  My gut reaction was that it was someone on the inside, but who the hell had I employed for that long?

  “I’ll talk to Ross and see if he can think of anyone off the top of his head. You get back to work,” I said.

  “Jimmy, I should’ve come to you wish this sooner. I’m sorry,” Ashley said.

  “As your boss, I have to reprimand you. Yes, you should’ve come to me the moment you realized these discrepancies weren’t technological or formulaic. I appreciate you taking the initiative, but I didn’t hire you to be a detective. I hired you to be the investor’s accountant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As your significant other? Thank you for putting in all that work. I appreciate you being concerned about how this would affect me. I’ll take this to Ross. Now let me make some phone calls,” I said.

  I dismissed Ashley from my office and watched her walk back into hers. She seemed to stand a little taller, and her hands were no longer twisted up in her cardigan. That was enough for me right now. I had greater things to tend to if I was going to continue spending my evenings with her, however, which meant I had to redirect.

  “Knock, knock.” Ross poked his head into my office.

  “Just the man I wanted to see. Get in here,” I said.

  “Everything okay? Things seemed pretty tense in here with you and Ashley,” he said.

  “Do the initials L.R. mean anything to you?” I asked.

  “Uh, left-right?”

  “A person’s initials?” I asked.

  “Lionel Richie?”

  “Come on, Ross. Be serious.”

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  “Twenty million dollars, that’s what.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Remember me reprimanding Mr. Brent for slapping those balance sheets on Ashley’s desk a few days ago?”

  “What’s going on, Jimmy?”

  “She found some issues she says date all the way back to the beginning of the company.”

  I picked up a folder and handed it to Ross for him to look at. The moment he flipped it open, his eyes grew wide. He was taking in all of Ashley’s notes and running the calculations in his head. He flipped sheet after sheet, his hands gripping the folder so hard, his knuckles were turning white.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. Ashley said the initials L.R. are attached to just about every one of the faulty transactions too,” I said.

  “We need to check employee records,” Ross said.

  “She already did that. Past and present.”

  “Is it possible this is Nina?”

  “Not if it dates back more than a couple of years.”

  “Jimmy, this is serious.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I asked. “None of the transactions breaches fifty dollars at a time, and the ending totals for the balance sheets are what they’re supposed to be, according to Ashley. It would be easy for someone to overlook that, especially with all the work we throw at our Accounting department.”

  “That’s still no excuse. You mean to tell me no one caught this in the twelve years we’ve been active?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Ross, I don’t fucking know. I’ve got a couple of places I could look to make sense of the initials, but that’s literally all I have at my disposal without involving the police.”

  “I’m sure the IT department can help us out with this. We have a cybersecurity department for a reason, Jimmy. I’ll go down there and see what I can figure out.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got some more employee records I can scour,” I said.

  “Meet back here at the end of the day?” he asked.

  “See you then.”

  Chapter 18

  Ashley

  I could breathe a little easier now that I’d told Jimmy about what I found. Cass had been right. Telling him even though I didn’t have any answers was what I needed to do, not only for the company but for the sake of my sanity. With that off my shoulders, I could focus on other things like setting up the rest of my new place and making sure my mother was okay.

  Her last episode had me worried. Her lucidity was fading, and it was becoming almost impossible for the nurses at the home to treat her without constant medical intervention. She was growing angry and becoming combative. She was forgetting she was hungry and missing meals. I used the time I wasn’t unpacking my apartment to do research and figure out where I could go from here with my mother and what the best course of action was. If the nursing home she was in didn’t have the ability to take care of her, that was fine. They had taken care of her for the past three years, and they had done a wonderful job.

  Maybe it was time for me to find her a new place.

  Sitting down at my desk, I tried to focus on the PDF I was creating for the investors, but my mind kept going back to those balance sheets. I wish Jimmy would’ve let me talk to Ross, not because I could’ve communicated the message better but because I wanted to get a read on his body language. I didn’t think Jimmy would steal from his company but approaching him gave me the ability to study him. To gauge his reaction to the situation and figure out where he stood with it. I was able to scrutinize him without him knowing what I was doing, which went a long way in me trying to figure out who L.R. was.

  Because Jimmy wasn’t going to fight this fight alone.

  Being able to tell Ross would’ve given me the ability to scrutinize him as well. In the back of my mind, I knew Jimmy didn’t have a bad bone in his body. He would never dream of stealing from his company. But owners and operators did that sort of thing and so did COOs.

  I didn’t want to think Ross was capable of something like that, but no one ever knew until it happened.

  In situations like these, it always seemed to be the person least suspected of doing it.

  I sent off the quarterly PDF to the investors before Ross came and knocked on my door. Jimmy was holding a meeting in his office to go over the possibilities of who L.R. could be. I gathered my things and locked up my office, suddenly paranoid about anyone going in there while something like this was happening.

  When I walked into Jimmy’s office, I could tell he was distressed.

  “Ross, shut my door,” Jimmy said. “We can sit in the corner on the couches.”

  “Jimmy, what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Doors shut,” Ross said.

  “You’re worrying me,” I said.

  “Ross went and talked to the IT department yesterday. He was able to pull up the past few months of faulty transactions and trace the IP address. Someone’s tapping into our system from outside this company,” Jimmy said.

  “And you have proof of that,” I said.

  “Yes,” Ross said. “IT is sending us a full workup this afternoon. I wanted them to give us IP addresses and trace them back as far as they could pull up the original transactions.”

  “So, we aren’t looking at someone in the company?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Jimmy said. “But with the tampering coming from the outside, it’s going to force us to involve the police.”

  “Which means more media attention if someo
ne talks,” Ross said.

  “So make them sign an NDA or something,” I said.

  “The police don’t work like that,” Jimmy said.

  “Hire a private detective. A security team. Something,” I said. “Jimmy, if this gets out to the public—”

  “I know, I know,” Jimmy said. “I know, Ashley, but I don’t have a lot of choices here. If this was coming from inside the company, tracking the person down would be easy. I don’t have the tools or the resources to track down who this could be outside of these walls.”

  “Then pay someone, Jimmy. That’s your resource,” I said.

  “Told you she wouldn’t be a fan,” Ross said.

  A knock came at the door before the knob began to turn. I watched Jimmy’s face morph from confusion to anger until the door slowly opened. Jimmy breathed a sigh of relief as Markus walked through the doors, and I was glad he was there.

  Maybe he could talk some sense into Jimmy.

  “Everything good?” Markus asked.

  “We’re just ... having a meeting,” Jimmy said.

  “Anything I can help with?” Markus asked.

  “Actually, yes,” I said.

  “Jimmy? You want to loop him in?” Ross asked.

  “Loop me in on what?” Markus asked.

  “Just hold off on your lecture until later,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m all ears, then,” Markus said.

  “Someone’s been stealing and tampering with company money,” Jimmy said.

  “What?” Markus asked.

  “Ashley was the one who caught the figures. The balance sheets dating close to the inception of the company all have weird little transactions. The entire balance sheet for any given month has been tampered with,” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t follow,” Markus said.

  “Someone’s moving money around under the initials L.R.,” Jimmy said. “No more than fifty dollars at a time but it’s frequent. According to Ashley’s totals, it’s over twenty million since the start of the company.”

  “Basically,” Ashley said. “The first three years of transactions don’t have a username or initials attached to the transactions, but I’m assuming it’s still the same person. Or at least the same basic action.”

  “Someone’s stealing from my damn company, Markus, investing in stock before cashing the accounts out, going back into the balance sheets themselves, and fudging the numbers at the end of the sheets to reflect what they should. Whoever this is, they’re good, but they’re also not in this building.”

  “How do you know that?” Markus asked.

  I furrowed my brow as I watched Markus’s face. At first, he seemed shocked, but it was expressed by his eyebrows, not his eyes. He was studying Jimmy intently, hanging onto every word. Which would have been normal, had it not been coupled with the fidgeting Markus was doing. It was concealed, and the only reason I noticed it was because I did that kind of fidgeting all the time. Wiggling my toes in my shoes. Picking at my nails at my sides. Clenching my jaw and biting the inside of my cheek.

  Markus was nervous.

  “Do you have any idea who could be doing this?” Markus asked. “Because if the media gets a wind of this, you’re toast.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Jimmy’s wanting to involve the police.”

  “As opposed to a private team?” Markus asked.

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said. “What do you think he should do?”

  “I think you should keep it as contained as possible until it’s absolutely necessary for you to involve outside forces, whether it’s a private team or the Miami PD,” Markus said.

  “Markus? Do you have any idea who L.R. might be?” I asked.

  “What’s L.R.?” he asked.

  “The initials that keep popping up with the transactions,” Jimmy said.

  “Not off the top of my head. If you’re looking at someone from the outside like you think, it could literally be anyone,” Markus said.

  “No one at all? From the investor board or anyone from the parties we threw together?” Jimmy asked.

  “I told you I don’t know,” Markus said.

  I looked over at Ross as I drew in a deep breath. Defensiveness. Markus was getting defensive at our questions. Why? Did he feel he was being interrogated? Ross looked at me with a weird stare before we turned our gazes to Jimmy, but his back was to us, and he was looking out the window. His hand was raking through his hair, and his leg was jiggling. His shoulders pulled taut, he heaved a heavy sigh.

  “I’ll do what I can to help, but if you really want my advice? Keep it contained,” Markus said. “For as long as you can.”

  Markus’s statement sat with me all night. Why would someone who cared so much about Jimmy not want him to take whatever measures necessary to figure out what was happening? Keeping it within the company seemed idiotic, especially when they had proof the transactions were happening from outside the company. I sat in my apartment that night and racked my brain. I knew I was missing something obvious, something vital.

  I closed my eyes and finished off my glass of wine. Jimmy had dismissed me early from that meeting but kept Markus and Ross with him. Part of me was irritated that he wanted me gone, but part of me saw it as a good thing. I was able to come home, relax, and try to see if I could figure out what it was I felt I was missing.

  I brought my wine glass to my lips as I rifled through my memories of Markus.

  Then, it hit me.

  The conversation I’d had with Markus last weekend.

  “The last time I visited my mother, she called me Lou. Which was close. That’s my middle name. My father’s name was Lou, and I figured she thought maybe I was him.”

  My skin crawled as I continued to recount the conversation in my mind.

  “Worse. She sometimes forgets she even got married. The nurses will come in and call her by her name, and she’ll correct them, tell them her last name is Roth and not Bryant.”

  Was it possible? Was I reaching too far for this? Jimmy had told me on several occasions Markus had been in this with him from the beginning as his very first investor. That would’ve given Markus access to all sorts of things, especially if Jimmy had leaned on him for financial and business advice. Hell, Jimmy might’ve given Markus access to his accounts to help him grow his company in the beginning. And Jimmy would be blind to it. He trusted Markus like a son trusted his father, which meant the last person he would consider would be Markus.

  In situations like these, it always seemed to be the person least suspected of doing it.

  I shot up from the couch and set my wine on the coffee table. I couldn’t believe I was just figuring this out. I had to tell Jimmy. I had no idea how I was going to tell Jimmy, but it was the only thing that made sense. With Markus being there from the beginning and having his setup in Alberta, it would make sense as to why the transactions were coming from outside the company. And if “Lou Roth” was the reason for choosing the initials L.R., it meant there was only one last question to ask.

  When had Markus moved to Alberta from Miami?

  Because I bet if I asked Jimmy, he would say nine years or so, which would be three years after his company was started.

  Chapter 19

  Jimmy

  “Jimmy Sheldon.”

  “Morning, Jimmy,” Ashley said.

  “Good morning, beautiful. To what do I owe this phone call? Are you in your office already?”

  “No, that’s what I was calling about. I’m not really feeling well.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I mean, I need to book a doctor’s appointment. My doctor has walk-in hours this morning. I’ve just had this nagging migraine, and nothing I have around here is helping.”

  “Then stay there. I’ll come get you and take you to the doctor.”

  “It’s fine. Really. I’m going to take a cab. I wanted to call and let you know I probably won’t be in until after lunch.”

  “Take the day. Or
know you have the option. You can always remote into work with the laptop we gave you if you need to,” I said.

  “I always forget I have that thing.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to come take you? It’s been a slow morning.”

  “I promise I’m okay. I think I need something stronger to get it to go away. Or maybe I should stop drinking so much coffee.”

  “I’d hate to see the caffeine withdrawals.”

  “I blame you. The stuff at your place is much more potent than what I usually drink,” she said.

  “You seem to be in high spirits for someone with a migraine.”

  “Sunglasses and a dark room do wonders,” she said.

  “Well, get yourself to a doctor and call me to let me know what’s going on. Okay? And don’t come in here with a migraine. Stay home if you need to.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  I hung up the phone and sat back in my chair. I wanted to believe Ashley, but there had been moments recently when she had openly admitted to lying to me. I understood the reasons, and she had come clean about all of it, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling she wasn’t actually sick. Was she still worried about this money business? I mean, it had us all worried. But she did her job beautifully. She didn’t have to worry about it any longer. This wasn’t an issue she needed to deal with anymore.

  Was she lying to me again? Or was she really sick?

  I sat back in my chair and turned to look out over the Miami ocean. The options I had to tackle this issue were rolling around in my head. I agreed with Markus about keeping this as contained as possible, but not involving anyone seemed reckless. Twenty million dollars was easily enough money to take my company to the next level, and the fact that someone had toggled that kind of money underneath my nose made me burn with anger. Ross wanted me to branch out and involve as many people as possible, but that didn’t make sense to me either. More people knowing what was going on meant more of a chance it could get leaked to the media with a storm of bad press ensuing.

  And that wasn’t going to be good, either.

  I didn’t know what to do. I knew I could trust Markus’s opinion, even if our needs for a situation didn’t line up. I wanted to talk to him about security teams. Private detectives. I wanted to know what my best bet was going forward that didn’t involve me going to the police.