Above Temptation

by Karin Kallmaker

  Well, her devil’s advocate argued, to get it tax free, or to possibly recover an insurance payoff in its place. She’d seen that plenty of times. But she had no inkling that SFI—or Sterling—needed a cash infusion. Corporate fraud investigation was a growth industry.

  Ted Langhorn was next on her list. Along with the other suspects, Ted was a member of the operating board. The directors were all employees in charge of various areas of responsibility.

  Langhorn’s responsibility was client development. He had a small staff, of which he was the most visible. SFI didn’t advertise, but Ted Langhorn attended conferences and symposiums and often taught small how-to-spot-fraud seminars for senior managers. The job required charm, intelligence and the ability to stand endlessly at cocktail parties, smiling and appearing to enjoy any and all topics of discussion. Kip lasted about ten minutes at “networking” events, so she admired Ted Langhorn’s ability to make small talk. He certainly brought in the clients.

  Running into him outside Tamara’s office was the first time she’d been that close to him, but she had spent several minutes talking to his wife at the last company picnic. Nadia Langhorn was as cool as Ted was warm. She’d chatted politely, looking impossibly elegant in a simple white linen shirt and jeans. Her perfect tan was visible through a fashionable rip in her jeans high on the outside of one thigh. It was chic, but Kip couldn’t help thinking they were suited to a woman ten years younger. There was also one tidbit of office gossip, that before she’d married Ted, Nadia and Tamara Sterling had been an item.

  Next up, Cary Innes was in charge of finance, and that put her ahead of Ted on the list, but right behind Tamara. Cary had the final say on where the pension funds were invested. She would be intimately involved in balance management. She was relatively new to SFI, having been hired away from a client. Perhaps as a new employee she’d seen opportunities to steal that established employees might miss, such as a weakness in their banking protocol software. Innes also reviewed the bank statements for the largest accounts, but in keeping with their internal controls, she didn’t review reconciliations for accounts where she had signatory authority.

  Because Innes had access, most of her work was conducted in a fish bowl and her authority was heavily constrained. Multiple reviews of her signed agreements, no authority to authorize even petty cash and so on. Everything she signed was reviewed by a senior staff member—they were fraud investigators and knew how to control their assets. That was why embezzlement at SFI looked so bad. If anyone should be able to prevent it, it was them.

  After Innes came Diane Morales, who managed the offices in California and Illinois. She had been with SFI since its founding, one of the first managers Tamara had brought on. She was a busy woman who traveled a great deal. For that alone, Kip ruled her out as a suspect acting on her own. Or would be able to if she could get a record of when Diane’s ID card had been swiped at the Seattle office. It just didn’t seem as if Diane could count on being in Seattle at the precise times she needed to be to do the statement doctoring.

  Her laptop’s drive whirring, she used her SFI login at a private credit reporting agency and pulled credit, driving and employment histories on her four suspects. Embezzlers were invariably neck deep in debt. As their debts piled up, they blamed their inadequate salaries which became “justification” to steal from their employer. She’d heard the excuses often enough. She dished herself some blackberry sorbet while her printer chunked out the reports.

  For each of her suspects she learned physical characteristics, marital status, names of all dependents, automobile license numbers, driving records, home address and phone, schools they’d claimed they’d attended, their largest creditor payments and their full credit history right down to the names of the banks they dealt with. No matter that she often relied on gathering information this way, the availability of all that data so quickly and so cheaply was disconcerting. Her scruples were mollified by the fact that she was looking for a thief and that she was responsible with the information she collected.

  She started to read Tamara’s profile, but the letters literally danced in front of her eyes. She used what was left of her concentration to update her work log with her findings to date and to back up all her computer files quickly onto a thumb drive.

  It had been a long day, and she couldn’t help but feel that she wasn’t really getting anywhere. This job was difficult working alone. A team would have probably singled out a prime suspect by now. It wasn’t that uncommon for SFI to open and close a case in forty-eight hours. She couldn’t call in sick again tomorrow without a real malady to show Emilio, so she’d need another long stint tomorrow night before she was ready to make a coherent report.

  As she settled into bed, she recalled that she was to report to Tamara Wednesday evening. It should have made her anxious, but instead she slipped into welcome sleep.

  * * *

  “I want your office,” Diane said as she closed Tam’s office door behind her. “You can work somewhere else.”

  Tam grinned as she rose to give Diane a welcoming hug. “Sorry I couldn’t join you for lunch. I had to get back.”

  “Sure you did.” Diane’s tone was dry. “That shiner is turning purple.”

  Tam retreated to her chair, still grateful that Diane hadn’t realized that Tam had been talking to Kip when she’d waved from across the street. “Don’t ask.”

  “As if. When Mercedes sent me in she told me not to ask too.”

  “It was an accident. Really.” She hoped Diane would let it go. Their friendship went back to just before she’d left the Feds to open SFI. Diane had been briefly under investigation by Tam’s unit. She was exonerated, but they remembered each other when they’d found themselves waiting in the same airline boarding area. That conversation had led to a wonderful, positive collaboration.

  She patted the bruise. “Someday I will tell you all about it, I promise. Mercedes isn’t speaking to me because I won’t spill the story.”

  Diane dropped into a guest chair and stretched her legs. “I suppose I can wait. Just not too long. I’d drag it out of you, but there’s this to go over.” She boosted her briefcase onto the desk. “I’ve got two final reports. Mercedes gave me two more.” She pursed her lips. “But first, we need to talk about something Hank faxed me. He wasn’t sure you’d want Mercedes to see it.” She handed Tam a memo on the New York office director’s stationery.

  Tam glanced through the contents as Diane continued, “He said you would make sense of it for me.”

  Hank wrote that he was getting a polite “Your services aren’t needed” when he followed up on the mysterious meeting cancellation on Saturday morning. Since then, two meetings with clients in the final stages of contract approval had been canceled. Looking back, Hank had also found a pattern among NY clients. The cancellations for himself and his own staff had started as long as three weeks ago.

  Diane listened to the account of the New York fiasco, then said, “I’ll ask Eric in Los Angeles and Melanie in Chicago to keep an eye out for anything like this happening. I’ll take care of San Francisco myself. First thing when I get back there on Wednesday morning.”

  “If there’s a wide pattern you know what that means, don’t you?”

  Diane nodded. “A rumor. A rumor that SFI has troubles.”

  Tam could only agree. She wanted in the worst way to tell Diane about the embezzlement—it even seemed likely there was a correlation, though at the moment she couldn’t see what it might be. But it was more important she tell Kip Barrett about the situation, because that would make the embezzlement possibly the part of a larger plan, and greed not the only motive.

  As she and Diane discussed the reports and caseloads in the regional offices a part of Tam’s brain was spinning in overtime. Who? Why? And how soon before some kind of rumor surfaced in business trades?

  A cocktail party fundraiser was the last way she wanted to spend her evening, but incurring Nadia’s wrath was something she didn’t need t
o do right now. She really had no choice but to settle down to working on reports with Diane, going to the silly party and trusting that Kip Barrett was making headway.

  Chapter Six

  It wasn’t humanly possible to label exhibits and work on another investigation at the same time, especially if every aspect of that investigation was secret. On Tuesday morning, Kip’s cubicle was still buried in paper files and she had until the end of the week to finish the last several hundred. Even if there had been room, spreading SFI bank statements and the personal histories of SFI directors out on top of that mess felt like setting off an everybody-come-have-a-look flare. Every time she made an attempt to read the reports someone showed up to talk.

  By late afternoon all the jumping like a guilty child when the phone rang or someone walked by her cubicle was getting old. But even her cursory attempts to filter through all the paper she’d gathered had eliminated Morales and Langhorn of the capability of acting alone as the embezzler. As soon as she had a travel record for Sterling and a keycard use record for Innes she could clear them as well. From the personal dossiers, none of the SFI directors appeared to have a monetary motive for embezzlement, either.

  Two steps forward was also one step back. It was also true that all of the SFI directors had the means to hire a hacker of the highest caliber. Only Sterling and Innes had the access with their physical presence—Langhorn and Morales traveled far too much—to support the work of the hacker by doctoring the paper account records. Sterling had the skill to actually be the hacker. There were black holes in her personal history that meant she, or the Feds, had put some of her employment history behind a claim of national security. Her precise assignment with the government was blank, her security clearance—blank again. There was nothing in Sterling’s dossier Kip couldn’t have learned from the annual report.

  With one exception, she reminded herself. She had been very surprised to learn that Tamara had been born in what was then East Berlin. When she’d relocated to the United States, and with whom, even the names of her parents, wasn’t in the publicly accessible paperwork Kip had pulled. Not that the missing data was relevant. Still, she disliked blanks and either the Feds had seen to the computer version of redacting the data when she’d been in their employ, or Tamara Sterling had done it herself—she had the skills for it.

  She wanted the travel and keycard records in the worst way, because that would resolve the first level of the ETO. It really made no sense to go on suspecting Tamara, but every time she told herself she was certain, an inner voice would warn her she was acting without evidence. And there was another little voice that reminded her that Sterling made her anxious and scared in not entirely unwelcome ways.

  She ignored both little voices and forged ahead with her other thoughts. One of the directors acting alone was a long shot, and colluding among themselves equally unlikely. No, she was most likely looking for a paid hacker and an accomplice within SFI—and that could be one of the directors, she accepted that. The accomplice could also be just about anyone with a keycard, it seemed, given how easily she’d walked into the records area. She suspected security protocols had been tampered with. Pinpointing when might be a helpful bit of information, but hardly her priority. She was faced with literally hundreds of suspects as accomplices.

  Okay, so she could finish the highest level ETO with the keycard swipe records, so how was she going to get them without going through regular channels? Even Sterling couldn’t just ask for them without a number of people wondering why. She had no doubt that Sterling could get them by herself though. But that meant the list was worthless. She couldn’t accept as truthful any evidence supplied by someone who was technically still a suspect.

  Two people paused near the entrance of her cube, talking about football. She quickly shoved some of her paperwork in a drawer, and cursed herself for being so jittery. She had looked forward to a tidy explanation, a neat report for Tamara Sterling. But now she was going to have to admit she—they—might be in over their heads.

  She went back to tagging exhibits until her cube neighbor, Michael, knocked on her cubicle frame.

  “Just making the rounds. I’m going to miss working with you,” he said.

  “Goodness! Is today the day?” Kip rose to hug him. “I want to hear how the other half lives.”

  “It won’t be nearly as much fun, I’m sure.”

  They chatted a bit more and she hugged him again when he moved on to the next person. Michael was a good member of the team, but he and another colleague had started dating. They’d been wise not to hide it for long—the last time someone had kept quiet and hoped not to be discovered both parties had been quickly fired. Once Michael and his girlfriend had disclosed their relationship they’d both been given the same choice. Michael was the one who had decided to resign. At first he’d been a little bitter about it, even though he knew he’d signed the same code of conduct agreement that everyone else had. She hoped his new job with First National’s Internet Fraud group worked out.

  Nearly an hour later her desk phone shrilled, breaking Kip out of an exhibit-numbering focused zone. She let voice mail pick up the call. It was the very end of the workday and if it was Emilio he’d come looking for her if he really needed her.

  The phone rang again, went to voice mail, then rang again. Kip’s heart sank. She could think of only one person with that kind of persistence.

  “I was just checking in.” Tamara was trying to sound relaxed, Kip thought, but her voice was strained. “I did manage to leave you alone for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “I have made some progress,” she said, aware that her voice, too, was noticeably strained. She couldn’t help it. “But not as much as I had hoped, or as you would like, I’m sure.” It could be Tamara, she reminded herself. Don’t relax. Maybe she wants to know if you’ve figured out the method yet. Stay vigilant, Barrett.

  “I think I’ll have everything in shape tomorrow night as we discussed,” she continued. “I can’t imagine it taking until Thursday.” She felt as if she were standing on quicksand. How could she play this out if Tamara was guilty? But it was so likely that she wasn’t… But what if…? Why did not knowing make her feel sick to her stomach? Maybe it was the flu, and if it was, someone else would have to ride this seesaw.

  Way to go in the intestinal fortitude department, she scolded herself, wishing your problems on someone else.

  “Why don’t we say tomorrow night—come on in, Di.”

  Kip could hear a woman on the other end saying she’d come back, but Tamara told her to have a seat. Was that Diane Morales with her? Still?

  “If I’m ready, I’ll leave you a message. I really think I’ll be ready.”

  “All right then, talk to you tomorrow.” As she hung up, Kip could hear the other woman saying something about dinner.

  Was it Diane Morales? And if so, what did she and Tamara have to talk about again?

  Stop it, Kip, she told herself. You are getting needlessly paranoid. Tamara and Diane must have a thousand things to discuss about business. If they were colluding Tamara wouldn’t be so foolish as to let you know she was in touch with Diane. Besides, there was the no-fraternization rule, and they would both be violating it. Well, if they were embezzlers, why would they care?

  She was officially spinning in circles. She was momentarily too dizzy to stand up. Too much data, too much pressure. It was terrifying, after her years of experience, not to know what to do next.

  * * *

  Tam surreptitiously glanced at her watch. She didn’t know how Diane could stand small talk. She’d been the picture of congeniality last night at the library donor cocktail party and tonight she was glad-handing as successfully as Ted with Seattle’s top financial managers. Two nights in a row standing around being polite, but she looked as if she was having the time of her life. Mercedes, who had planned the client appreciation event, was also making effortless chitchat with clients, and if her feet hurt in those elegant suede pumps it didn’
t show.

  Everyone, in fact, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. She hoped that her own morose frame of mind was going unnoticed. She couldn’t concentrate on peeled shrimp and eight kinds of artisan cheese.

  Diane had found that both the Los Angeles and Chicago offices had had mysterious cancellations but, like Hank, she had so far been given no real answers as to why. Tamara knew it had something to do with the embezzlement and she longed to tell Diane about it, but she knew it compromised Kip’s effectiveness and would rob her of the focus from her primary goals: recovering funds and identifying the thief. Tam had only her own suspicion, even if the link seemed obvious to her.

  She touched her face, far less swollen this evening than on Sunday. The bruising was hidden by more makeup than she would normally wear in a year. She trusted Kip Barrett, maybe because the blow hadn’t been a limp slap but an unvarnished, honest message: respect me or pay the consequences.

  Kip had sounded tired and tense when she’d spoken with her. She had put a heavy burden on such petite shoulders but every time she wondered if the burden was too much, her face told her that petite didn’t mean weak.

  She pulled her thoughts up short. Kip was an employee, and on assignment. She thought of Kip far too often in other ways, including those brief moments in the elevator when petite was the last adjective she would have used. Others were much better, like warm and strong. It wasn’t the thing to do just because she was bored stiff and she longed for a good night’s sleep. A wrong number had woken her up last night at two in the morning. After that she’d kept startling awake, thinking the phone was ringing again.

  “Tamara, sweetie, who is she?”