The Aspen Account (9 page)

He scanned his security badge to enter the inside stairway and bounded down the steps to the floor where the revenue manager worked. As he entered the eighteenth floor, the dim area lit up once again.

Even when it was empty, the corporate headquarters seemed to have its own life force, reacting to various stimuli like a living thing. He looked up at one of the small black spheres on the ceiling, wondering which direction the masked security camera was pointing. Praying it was watching only the exits, he moved down the hallway toward the revenue manager’s office.

He was relieved to find that the revenue manager had not locked his door. However, when he tried to open the top drawer of one file cabinet, it wouldn’t open. Michael had been a notorious amateur lock-picker in college—impressing his friends and occasionally leading to minor trouble with local sororities. His abilities were limited to simple locks, of course, but the lax tumbler design for these cabinets shouldn’t present much of a problem. Using two paperclips from the desk, he had unlocked all four cabinets in five minutes.

Happily, the files were well organized. As he found the various contracts, he checked each off the list he had printed, until he had pulled what looked to be all the new contracts for the year. Once he had amassed a sixteen-inch pile, he lifted them in his arms and headed back to the staircase. He had to scan his security badge going in and out of the stairwell, and to his horror, he almost dropped the files while balancing them on his knee to work the badge across the door’s scanner.

Then, opening the door to the twentieth floor, he felt a fresh stab of fear. All the lights in the corridor running toward the executive wings were now lit, meaning that someone had triggered the sensors in the past few minutes. He set the contracts under the desk of a vacant cubicle and walked slowly toward the executive wing. It was possible that someone from the cleaning crew had triggered the lights, but he needed to know for sure whether anyone else was working in the executive wing. If someone was still around, he would need to be very careful indeed.

His instincts warned him that he was not alone, and he found himself peeking around each corner down the long corridor. His eyes widened as he peeked around the third turn and saw both twins in Don Seaton’s office. Lucas was working at the computer; Lance stood behind him. Michael pulled his head back. It was now after nine o’clock—he had thought surely they were gone by now. Peeking around the corner again, he watched them at a distance until he was convinced they hadn’t seen or heard him. Then he backtracked to the cubicle where he had hidden the contracts.

Back in the audit room, he started digging through the details, verifying the legal language and figures with the findings in the firm’s audit. Everything appeared fine until he got to the twenty-third page of the fifth contract. Here was language that didn’t belong. He had seen nothing in the company’s records to account for this language. In fact, the only place he had seen such a scenario was in his fraud identification training. If this one short paragraph, which completely changed the terms of the business deal, was repeated in enough contracts, it would overestimate the company’s income by millions, artificially inflating the stock price. The results could be disastrous.

He tensed, now on full alert. Slapping a sticky note next to the paragraph, he moved on to the next contract. He flipped back to the same section and felt a tingle as he saw the same wording again. Then he looked at the remaining contracts and found the same words in most of them. He reread the paragraph. It was verbatim every time: the same blatant accounting misstatement, the same inflation of earned revenue during the period. The consistency left no doubt in his mind: it was intentional, which meant it was fraud.

It was impossible to tell how the fraud had happened or how many people might be involved, but the truth was inescapable: the accounting records were reporting two to three times the actual revenue for these contracts. It was too early to know how much the company’s total revenue was overstated, because he still needed to work through some calculations to determine how much revenue
should be
reported for the contracts, then compare that with the inflated figure being reported. By three in the morning he had read through every contract and calculated the proper revenue amounts, and what he had found was precisely the conspiracy that he and Glazier had spent the past eighteen months searching for. And apparently—he realized with a sudden sense of danger—Kurt Matthews must have found it, too.

He made copies of the contracts before returning them to Laidlaw’s office. As he left the building, he sensed an unusual calm in the air. The parking lot was quiet as a graveyard. He went to his car, a leather case of copied documents in each hand. Putting them in the back of the Audi, he noticed a newish-looking Ford Mustang in the far corner of the lot. Its black exterior had rendered it all but invisible in the night, but he could see that it had parked diagonally across the rows, as if to give it a clear view of the front of the building.

Turning back to his Audi, he got in and drove out of the parking lot. But as he entered the main boulevard that snaked back toward the interstate, he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror, watching the Mustang for as long as the fading image remained in sight.

Nearing the edge of the Tech Center, he abandoned the interstate, cut through a sleeping neighborhood, and circled back to the corporate park—he had to know if he was just being skittish.

He was back at X-Tronic only ten minutes after leaving. Scanning the parking lot, he felt a deep sense of foreboding. The Mustang was gone. 

15

MICHAEL THREW THE Audi into third gear, punched the accelerator, and pulled through another tight turn overhanging a steep drop-off deep in the Rocky Mountains. With a racer’s aggressiveness, he pushed the car along the winding road. In his rearview mirror, the morning sun had set the snowcapped peaks ablaze. The cool air was reviving him after a sleepless night.

He hadn’t bothered calling in sick for work. He had merely woken up, sent a quick e-mail from home telling Falcon, Andrea, and Dustin that he had a stomach flu, and then thrown on his warmest casual clothes before dashing to the mountains to find a certain retired physician from the Parks and Wildlife Department.

After pulling through the next turn, he held third gear for two seconds, waiting until the needle passed six thousand rpm, then slapped it down-and-up into fifth gear. He was the only driver not respecting the electronic signs flashing “7% GRADE FOR THE NEXT 2 MILES.”

As he reached 90 mph, he tapped the button on the car’s Bluetooth twice, triggering the redial on his cell phone. He got a raspy recording—he would have to leave another message. He waited impatiently for the message to end before he began yelling into the phone.

“Glazier! Where the hell are you! I need to talk to you about Aspen—now! Something’s happened out here, and…” He tightened his grip around the wheel and pulled through another overhanging turn. “Look, this is going way beyond money now, so you’d better get ready to rethink this whole thing. I don’t know if I can do this much longer. I don’t care what you have to do to make it happen, but it’s time for you to take a trip to Denver.” Disgusted, he pressed the button again to end the call. Glazier was supposed to answer his calls immediately—no excuses. “Where the fuck are you, Glazier?” he asked again, this time to himself.

*     *     *

Michael followed the instructions he had printed from the Internet. When he turned onto a quiet snow-covered road, he realized he had entered the secluded high country. Tall, snow-covered firs and spruces canopied the road, enveloping him in a long, white tunnel. A half mile in, he came upon a scattering of cabins, built away from the road at regular intervals and half hidden in the trees. A husky stuck its head above the snow and watched with keen interest as he passed. 

A few hundred yards farther, Michael saw what he was looking for: 475 Maple Road. As he turned the car into the rough driveway and killed the engine, the cabin’s front door squeaked open, and an old man stepped onto the cold porch. Under a heavy wool balaclava, pale blue eyes glittered from a face weathered by many winters in the thin mountain air. 

“Don’t tell me—you’re Michael Chapman,” the man’s voice announced calmly. “You’re thirty minutes late.”

Michael caught the fresh scent of pine needles as he approached the cabin. “Dr. Speer. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect so much snow on the roads off the highway.”

The old man swatted the air in front of his face, as if to dismiss Michael’s miscalculation. “Welcome to the highlands. This isn’t Denver, you know. The snow sticks a little longer up here.” He turned to make sure his door had latched, then returned his gaze to Michael. “Anyway, I gave up on you. I’m on my way to take my two grandchildren ice-skating.”

“Dr. Speer, please—it’s very important that I speak with you.”

“It’s very important that I take my grandchildren ice-skating,” Dr. Speer corrected him. “They are my future, you know.”

“I’m here about your
past,
” Michael said, tucking his hands into his jacket after stopping in the crusty snow at the base of the front steps. “You met a friend of mine a week ago. I’d like to speak with you about that.”

“I meet a lot of people,” the old man replied as he came down the snowy steps toward Michael.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true. But this one would have left a strong impression—he was dead when you met him, up on Vail Mountain.”

The doctor stiffened halfway down the steps. His gaze had locked on to the snow, and his lips tensed, as if he were struggling with something. Then, after a few seconds, the doctor’s eyes cut sideways at him with a stern expression, and Michael realized the man was judging him.
He knows something,
Michael thought.
And he’s trying to decide if he should tell me
.

“Come with me,” the man finally said.

The hard, dry snow crunched underfoot as the doctor moved past him, toward an old red truck parked next to the cabin. There was no other sound from the snowy woods surrounding them. And the stillness of this beautiful, solitary place only seemed to heighten the sense that behind those kind gray eyes lay information that would forever change Michael’s life.

*     *     *

“If you see enough death, you begin to see patterns,” the doctor began. “A businessman’s heart exploding because he lived life too fast. When you first find the corpse, you can almost see the fear he felt when he realized he was going to die, that the party was over. Or an old woman, withered with age, with a long life in the distant past—perhaps she lost her husband twenty years ago and now longs for the promised reunion. But you can almost see the peace in her face when she went to sleep for the last time. Or a victim of a car accident, astonished, even in death, that such a thing could happen to them. But it never seemed right, you know, the way I found your friend. His face was not like any of the others. I had only seen that look once before, nearly thirty years ago.”

They were walking along the outer edge of the frozen lake outside Dillon, watching while Dr. Speer’s two grandchildren glided over the ice amid a few dozen other skaters of all sizes and ages.

“What look?” Michael asked.

Dr. Speer stopped and pulled his gloved hands from his coat pockets to snug the checkered scarf around his neck. “I must warn you that you could be hearing the intuition of an experienced doctor, or the delusions of a crazy old man.”

The muscles in the back of Michael’s neck were tight from the long hours he had worked the past few weeks. He rolled his head in a circle to ease the stiffness, then said, “Please, tell me what you saw.” 

“Thirty years ago, a Summit County Search and Rescue team found a victim of a bear attack near the Arapahoe National Wildlife Refuge, a few hours from here. He was a nature photographer that was reported missing. I was called in once they found the body.” Dr. Speer paused to watch the two small girls skating in endless circles, blissful in their small world. “The way his body had shriveled, his widened jaw, torn with claw marks, but above all, the horror in his eyes—they were open so wide, we were afraid they’d fall out if we moved him.”

“I can’t imagine such pain,” Michael said.

Dr. Speer’s lips pressed tight together, almost as if he felt the pain he was trying to describe. He continued, “It wasn’t that; it was something else: anger. He died with an anger that most never know.”

“Anger at the bear?” 

“Mm-m, maybe. At the time, that’s what I thought. But I could never forget his face, and years later, after my wife was killed, another idea occurred to me.” He paused a second, arms dangling at his side, looking as if the words were hard to say. “What if he was angry at God?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Dr. Speer’s lip curled as if he were trying to smile. But then he gave up the attempt, and his eyes grew sad. “Well, think about it. Anger towards fate. Anger at an injustice. That kind of anger, in the end, can only be directed at God.” He sat down in a patch of snow that had formed along the rim of the frozen lake, as if his memories were making him tired.

“If it’s not too presumptuous of me, how was your wife killed?” Michael asked, feeling a pang of sympathy at the painful solitude revealed in the old man’s face.

Dr. Speer looked down, seeing a preserved memory before glancing back at Michael with apologetic eyes. “I wasn’t angry with God for long, you know. A place like that . . . no, a person can’t stay there very long.”

“I’m sorry; it has to be a terrible loss.”

“It was a long time ago, I’m afraid. But back to your friend—I had every instinct that he was not killed in surprise. When we found his body, it didn’t seem full of shock or sorrow—it was anger.”

Hearing a sharp clatter, Michael turned toward the ice in time to see a young man whose skates had slipped out from under him, sending him sprawling on the hard ice. The man grunted and rolled onto all fours, and Michael was surprised at how sharp and clear the sound was. Looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was in earshot, he saw the skate rental hut, the cold parking lot lined with six-foot snowbanks, and the vast frozen lake that stretched far beyond the orange-coned perimeter of the polished skating rink. Seeing no one near them, he felt safe again about speaking to Dr. Speer.