Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration (7 page)

“Even if you weren’t insane, Jauntie, that would be business goodwill.”
 

She shook her head. “It is not.
 
All goodwill goes to his name. She’s done with it. Good riddance, right?” Juliette certainly thought so.
 
Cutting ties to the sharp-eyed judge she’d seen in newspaper pictures and TV interviews was for the best.
 
He looked like a wolverine.
 
“Mrs. Billings gets the LLC and its assets, but the goodwill is all his. There’s nothing stopping him from opening a competing rental property, should he wish to start another, similar LLC for his mistress,” she smiled sweetly.

He sat back slowly.
 
“Creative.
 
I’ve never seen someone argue a company’s value is lessened by the leaving of someone who’s not even a member of the company.”
 

She smiled.
 
“I got the award for Most Creative Use of Chocolate Éclairs at summer camp.”

“I’ll bet you did,” he murmured. He folded his fingers together over his flat belly and kicked his legs out, watching her.
 
She felt his energy sucking inward, like a black hole.
 
His eyes were pinned on her.
 

“What else?” he asked quietly.

“What else what?
 

“What else is bothering you?”
 

Right now, Johnny’s entire presence was bothering her.
 
But she didn’t think he meant was she bothered by the fact that chills raked across her body and her nipples got hard every time he looked at her, so she just shrugged.
 

“Nothing particular.”
 
She hesitated, then leaned forward again, her ribs pressed against the edge of the table. His gaze dropped like it was anchored to her chest.
 
“There are some funny things.”
 

His eyes inched back up. Good. Her breasts were starting to tingle. For a second she thought she saw something in his eyes, a flash of heat or something, but it was gone, quick as that.
   

“Funny ha-ha?” he said.

She shook her head. “No. It’s just…I don’t know. The appraisal. The rental receipts. Something just feels…off.”

His gaze skipped across her face. “What did Mrs. B say?”
 

“Nothing useful.
 
She says she left everything to the judge.”

“Maybe she should have looked over the paperwork for her company now and then,” he suggested.

“That’s just what I told her,” Juliette agreed sharply. “In no uncertain terms. She said she trusted her husband. I told her she was nuts. I think she appreciated my honesty.”

Johnny’s green eyes held hers for a long time. “I see,” he said in a real low voice. “So you must want to do a really impressive job here, huh?”
 

It was an innocuous question, seemingly, but packed with innuendo, especially the word ‘impressive,’ which dripped with meaning. With accusation. As if Juliette was pushing things right up to their limit, trying to impress. Angling. Ambitious.

He was right, too. But that didn’t mean she pushed over the limit. Or that she was out of line.
 

So she narrowed her eyes at him.
 
“Where’s the damned paperwork, Danger?”
   

He met her cold look with an equally cold smile and waved at the papers.
 

“They’re all yours, Jauntie.
 
Courtesy of a lot of pissed off people.”
 

Chapter Five

JULIETTE YANKED a folder off the top of the pile with more force than was necessary. Johnny pulled one off too, with exactly the right amount of force.

“What am I looking for?” he asked.

She blinked in surprise. “What?”

“What’s got you all hot and bothered?” He had one hand on the file, his gaze on his computer screen as he tapped away at the keys. “What’s funny? What are we looking for?”

Her heart bounced upward like a wave had come along. “You think something might be off, too? You believe me?” She wasn’t used to being believed.
 

Which was understandable. She’d gotten used to it. It had nothing to do with her abilities; she was one of the best, even if no one knew it yet.

No, it had more to do with the time she’d spent locked up as a youth. Those things tended to stick with a person. Sometimes on their record.

For a second, Johnny hesitated. Then his gaze slid to mine.
 

“I think you’re nuts, Jauntie. All I want to do is get this over with. If I help, we get done sooner.”

Her lifted heart fell with a bang. Of course. Never attribute anything hopeful or nice or
human
to Johnny Danger, or your heart would get broken. Not that her heart was involved here. It was just a saying. That she’d just made up.

“So, what are we looking for?” he said again, his gaze back on the screen.
 
“What’s the problem?”
 

“You mean aside from the original valuation method?
 
I want a real appraisal on the properties attached to the LLC.
 
Dan used a value-based appraisal, based on the rents coming in, which is the same method he used for the valuation.
 
I mean, there’s just no cross-check.
 
Don’t you find that odd?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “So, I want to see what those properties are actually worth.”
 

“Okay, a market value appraisal.
 
I knew about that.
 
What else?”
 
His voice was low, calm, like you’d talk to an angry dog.
 

She leaned a little closer and tapped her finger on the table.

“Rental receipts. Detailed accounts receivable. For every month of the last three plus years. And don’t bother telling me the income was reported on taxes,” she added swiftly, although Johnny didn’t look as if he’d been going to say anything of the kind. In fact, he didn’t look as though he’d ever speak again, so reclined and calm and composed was he. Ice.
 
She plunged on with her prosecutorial approach to accounting.
 
“Because the way I see it, if everyone wants to use rents from the property to assess value on my client, then I ought to be provided with a copy of those receipts, oughtn’t I?”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Even if they’ve been reported on taxes.”

“Makes sense.”

“Furthermore, I—
 
What?”

“Makes sense.”

“Oh.”

A man of few words. They sat in silence.
 

“Okay then,” she said lamely.

“Okay then,” he repeated. His gaze slid down her body on its way to the paperwork. He didn’t say another word.
 

She felt bereft at having been ripped out of the heat of battle like that. Then she quietly bent her head and went to work.

They worked for a long time.
 
That’s how Juliette measured time when she was working, immersed in it like water. There was ‘not long,’ ‘pretty long,’ ‘really long’ and ‘I’m going to pass out from low blood sugar.’
 

Johnny was the same.
 
She knew it.
 
She’d seen him too many times in the middle of the night, at the gym or in the garage, to suspect otherwise. Of course, she didn’t know if his blood sugar ever dropped—she’d never caught him wolfing down a bag of peanut M&M’s and a thermos full of coffee in the gym locker at three in the morning—but she did know that hammering out some wanna-be criminal’s financials all night long was no big deal to either of them.
 

They worked together pretty well, too, considering they were like two lone wolves stuck together on an ice floe.
 
Johnny’s section of the floe was powered for broke.
 
She was more of a pencil gal; she had an extra behind each ear, a sharpener in her bag and a pouch full of erasers, because the world was full of errors.

Occasionally they’d pass papers back and forth or shift their screens to each other, but mostly, Johnny clicked and she scribbled, while outside, it started to snow.
 

Everything she’d asked for was here. Hallelujah. But as she went through it, she became dissatisfied. Increasingly so.
 
It was a general feeling, nothing specific, nothing she could pin down, but she turned papers faster, scanning them swiftly, hoping to find something that explained the feeling or made it go away. Neither occurred.
 
Although she did notice an inordinate amount of summaries.

In fact, she was being bombarded by summaries.
 

She didn’t like these summaries. Everything was so…summarized.
 
Neat and orderly, all lined up for her.
 

Normally she liked that sort of thing. But even more than order, Juliette liked
detail
. And all this documentation—the rent rolls, the accounts receivable, the overflowing fountain of paperwork provided at her request in glorious abundance—was absent a whole lot of details.
 

No names. No dates. No payment types. No lease agreements. Just monthly totals of receivables in rent payments.
 

Still, even though there were not a lot of details, everything cross-checked perfectly and totaled to the penny. Everything was lined up just right: bank statements, taxes, P&L, expense reports, income. Still, it was just so….

“General,” she mumbled.

The sound seemed to disrupt Johnny’s work trance.
 
His body shifted, his shoulders moved slightly under the dark grey cotton. His head came up a little, his gaze stayed on the screen.

“General?” he murmured.

She flung herself back in her chair.
 
“I’m a detail girl, Johnny.”

“I’ll let everyone know.”

“And everything’s here—payments, the property manager’s reports for the past four years—”

“Excellent.”

“No, Johnny, not excellent,” she said sharply. “Adequate. Not excellent.”

He lifted his head.

“There are no detailed reports,” she said. “Of course, everything adds up,” she hastened to add, lest Johnny think she thought his client a criminal, which she did. “There weren’t any holes that I saw. Taxes, invoices, bank statements, it’s consistent across the board.”

He sat back. “Okay. And the problem is…?”

“Everything is just so…general.”

“But no holes?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then shook her head, defeated in her chimeraic pursuit of a gut feeling. “No,” she admitted. “No holes.”
 

He put his elbows on the arms of the chair and steepled his fingers below his chin and watched her silently. Waiting.
 

Their eyes met.
 
He waited some more.
 

Juliette wasn’t used to being waited on.
 
The experience became vaguely trance-like.
 
She kept looking at Johnny but stopped seeing him.
 
Her mind turned. She moved her gaze to the left and stared blankly over his shoulder, while mentally skimming her memories of the financial documents she’d just reviewed.
 
And eventually, something tripped her up.

Her gaze snapped down. One of Johnny’s dark eyebrows lifted.
 
She started scrabbling through the papers.
 

“Okay, look at this.” She extracted a few and thrust them at him. “Now, stay calm, this isn’t a hole per sé, but….”
 

“So I should stay calm?”
 

She ignored his humor and gave the papers a little shake. He reached out and took them.

“There are two properties held in the LLC, right?” she asked.

“Right.”

“Tell me, did you assume both properties brought in rent?”

He looked down at the documents. “I assume nothing. Why?”

“Because all the rental income appears to flow from only one of the properties. Not the other.”