The P.U.R.E. (16 page)

Jon returned an hour later, wearing a grim expression. His face and neck were flushed, and his hair mussed like he’d run his fingers through it a few too many times. I stood as he approached.

“What happened?”

“They fired me.”

“What! Oh my God, no! They didn’t even want to talk to me? I can’t believe this.” An unseen malevolent force sucked all the blood out of my head leaving me woozy. I grabbed the cubicle divider wall to steady myself.

“Once I confessed I hit Doug first, the circumstances didn’t matter.” He heaved a loud sigh and stared out over my head into the empty cubicles on the other side. “If I leave quietly they won’t report me for acts discreditable to the profession, and Doug won’t press charges. They cited me for assault on company property, insubordination, gross incompetence and inappropriate fraternization.” His gaze remained fixed in the distance.

“This is all my fault.” The injustice of HR’s treatment primed my tear ducts. I didn’t cry often, but being treated unfairly or made a fool of always got me.

“It’s not your fault.”

He tried to take me in his arms, but I pushed him away. “Not here! They’ve got no evidence of fraternization, so we can’t give them any.”

“They do, Gayle.”

“What? What kind of evidence?”

“They showed me a sequence of pictures of me kissing you outside your apartment early this morning. Both of our faces are recognizable. We’re in quite a clinch in a few of them.”

“Well, I wonder how they got those! Who the hell’s been watching my apartment? And who gives a shit about fraternization between two new hires anyway? We’re being set up, Jon, and I don’t think this is about Doug anymore.”

“What’s not about me?” The demon himself slithered into the cubicle in front of Jon, eyelids and nose grotesquely swollen, split bottom lip, blood pooled in dark circles below both eyes.

“Nice tattoo, Doug. Totally suits you.” I taunted him, referring to the faint black letters still visible on his forehead. I had never been more proud of my own handiwork than I was at that moment. I was even prouder of Jon’s.

Doug smirked. “One PURE down; one to go.” He leveled an imaginary gun at me and pulled the trigger.

Jon took my arm and shook his head. “Ignore him, Gayle.”

I shrugged off his hand and marched up to Doug. “You disgusting little worm. This isn’t over by a long shot. I know you were the one who broke into my apartment and trashed it. I’ve got DNA evidence you did it, evidence in police hands now. How stupid could you be, leaving your calling card behind? Your days are numbered, Doug Martin, so enjoy your final moments in the sun because it’s a dark, dark place where you’ll be going.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t break into your apartment. I don’t even know where you live.”

“Liar. You had my address written on a piece of paper in your wallet.”

“Oh, that. I thought you’d left your purse in the office last night. I took out your wallet to get your address. I was going to drop your stuff off on my way home, and this is the thanks I got.” He circled a hand in front of his face. “Last time I play the Good Samaritan for you.”

Jon pulled me away. “They’ll be here to escort me out in a second. Meet me out front on Elm.”

He threw his few possessions into his briefcase right as an HR employee and a security guard arrived. Jon handed them his office key, his building access fob and his laptop. The trio walked away toward the elevators.

Jon glanced at me over his shoulder.

“I’ll be right behind you,” I said. “I need to grab my stuff. I can’t leave anything unattended.”

Purse and briefcase in hand, I followed a minute later. I stepped outside and dropped my load to the sidewalk. Jon pulled me into a tight hug.

“Just let me hold you,” he whispered into my hair before he pulled back and gripped me by the shoulders. “You’ve gotta be prepared for your two o’clock. I was your only witness, but now I’ve been discredited, and you’ve been painted as a vindictive instigator of violence. You know they’ll use the same brush to paint your accusations as retaliation. They’ve got you for incompetence and fraternization, too.”

“Then I better find something in these two files before two o’clock, or my butt will also be out on the street. We need to go back to Aphrodite. I need to talk to Jayna, and we need to finish reviewing Doug’s work.”

“Let’s go then.”

I wasn’t worried about going AWOL at that point because I’d either find the evidence I needed to shift the focus to Doug and Bob, or they would fire me, too.

Aphrodite wouldn’t be surprised by our return since we’d only left the day before. We could easily play the dumb new hires who forgot a few critical steps.

I played embarrassed cluelessness quite well.

Nicky couldn’t hide her enthusiasm over Jon’s unexpected return when we reclaimed the audit room.

He’s mine now, bitch!
Whoa, where’d that come from?

Jon took the equity file, and I took the inventory file. Part of me kicked myself for not having reviewed them earlier. One kiss and I didn’t care about anything but being Jon’s lover. Why did I keep making the same mistake over and over? He lost his job because of me—if not because of the fight, then because I dragged him into every conspiracy theory I had concocted, whether real or imaginary.

I compared the final inventory value from our first audit to the value Doug audited. Not much had changed. They agreed to within a minor amount, implying that my and Jon’s counts had indeed been wrong, but I refused to accept that. Switching to the tie-out of the test counts, I fired up my laptop and opened my El Paso observation notes.

Unlike my first counts, my second counts matched Aphrodite’s. I pondered the meaning. The difference had to lie in the pricing, not the counts.

“I want to bounce something off you, Jon. If I wanted to overstate inventory, I might inflate the numbers on the first go round. If there was a recount because the first one seemed shady, I’d probably make a clean count, but to keep the value high, I’d inflate the post inventory sales. Does that sound logical?”

He paused a second, eyes darting back and forth as if reading an imaginary book. “Yes, it does.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He seemed to watch me for a few seconds as if waiting for me to say or ask something else. I smiled at him before I went back to work again.

“If they overstated inventory, where did the offset go?” he asked.

“Sales, I’d assume.”

“I doubt it went to sales. What if it was used to hide a shortage somewhere else, like cash?”

“Jon! That’s it! You’re so smart! If someone was stealing money from the company, they’d still need to match what the bank shows. To keep everything in balance, they’d have to increase another account by an equal amount. Inventory! Or a corporate jet! Or a car sold long before we got here?”

“Jayna has to know something.” Jon’s smile faded into a scowl. “You already figured this out, didn’t you?”

“I wondered.”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend to be dumb to make me seem smart.”

“I didn’t! I was only brainstorming with you.”

“Brainstorming ideas you’d already worked out for yourself!”

“Sheesh. Sorry.” I muttered to myself, “I can’t win.”

We simmered in annoyed silence for a while until I rose from my chair.

“Where are you going?” Jon asked.

“To talk to Jayna and maybe have a look through the cancelled checks.” I planned to wheedle what I could from her and get the latest bank statement. My backup plan was to account for all the cancelled checks and examine to whom they were payable and who signed the backs of them—a last ditch but tedious task I could ill afford time-wise.

“I didn’t find anything else, but the five thousand shares of preferred stock are still misclassified. I can get Nicky to give me access to the boxes of cancelled checks. How about I get started on them while you talk to Jayna?”

“Sure. That sounds like a terrific and original idea,” I said with a touch too much sarcasm and testiness.

“I’m sorry, Gayle.” He grasped the arm of my chair and rolled it closer to his, leaned over and kissed my cheek.

My face relaxed into a smile. “Forget about it. We’re both a little sleep deprived and grouchy and dare I mention desperate?”

He chuckled and motioned with his hand. “Go! Go! Time’s a wastin’.”

22

I knocked on Jayna’s door, and she jerked to attention. “Hi.Sorry to bother you, but I need your help wrapping up a few final details.”

“I thought you guys finished your fieldwork yesterday.”

“We did … mostly.” I rocked my head like a ditzy blonde. “It’s my first audit of an SEC client, and I’m still kind of learning.”

“Sure. No problem. How can I help you?”

I re-explained what Jon and I needed to confirm about some of Aphrodite’s most recent sales without giving away what I really wanted to know.

“Who’s the customer?” Jayne rose from her chair.

“The first one is Dalrymple Beauty Consultants dba LD Beauty, and this other one is Elizabethan Investments dba EI Beauty Supply. I think the ‘dba’ stands for ‘doing business as’, right?” I knew what dba stood for, but dumbing myself down seemed the best way to win her trust.

The dumb-blonde-chick ploy worked but was one I needed to ration so as not to convince the wrong people.

She stared at me for a few beats. “I-I don’t remember any sales to those companies.”

“I think I had those names correct. Hang on. Let me double-check.” I flipped through the pages to cure my imaginary memory lapse. “Yes. I got them right. Dalrymple and Elizabethan. They sound very regal, don’t they? Dalrymple. Elizabethan. Anyway, I see several large sales in mid-September and October. Wow, they purchased a lot of stuff right before your fiscal year end, too. I’m surprised you don’t remember big customers like those.” I kept my face as blank as I could.

Jayna’s distress betrayed itself in her eyes, the stiffness in her shoulders and the firm line of her mouth.

She rose, walked over to her filing cabinet and quickly flipped through a series of files. “No, sorry, I don’t have anything on file for those companies. Maybe they were misfiled. Can you check other ones instead?”

I plastered on an apologetic expression. “Unfortunately not. Once we make a selection, we have to stick to it. We can’t switch horses midstream. Maybe they’re in a different filing cabinet, perhaps in the storage room?”

She focused her gaze at her door, her pictures, her fingernails—everywhere but at me.

“I could help you search for them.”

She finally met my eyes, hers glistening with unshed tears.

I went in for the kill shot. “Aphrodite didn’t sell anything to Dalrymple or Elizabethan, did it?”

Her head bowed forward, and an almost imperceptible shake of her head followed. The faint splat of a tear hit the papers in front of her.

“You used the phony sales to inflate inventory to cover up the cash disappearances, didn’t you?”

She nodded, head still down, the motion dislodging more of her tears.

Splat, splat, splat.

“What did you do with the money, Jayna?”

Her head shot up, her eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t take the money!”

“Who did?” I already knew—had seen the culprit pilfering blank checks when Jon and I hid in the storage room.

“Kenneth!” She broke down sobbing, her face a classic tragedy mask. “H-he said he needed the funds to save the company.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I did at first, but when he never returned the money, I asked him when he was going to, and he said it was all gone. He’d lost all of it.” A quick wipe of her index fingers under each eye cleared the trail of mascara-tinted tears.

“What did he buy?”

“Stock options on several publicly traded companies.” She sniffed, grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. Her hitched breathing ceased. “He said it was supposed to be a sure thing.”

“Where did he get the stock tips?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He never said, other than his source was very reliable.”

“How much did Kenneth take out of the company?” I’d estimated the missing money at about five hundred thousand dollars.

“About five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Once he started borrowing, he couldn’t seem to stop,” she said.

I mentally patted myself on the back for my forensic work but felt sorry for Jayna, who Kenneth ran roughshod over as his lovesick accomplice. Her complicity in the cover-up, even after Kenneth’s death, roused my contempt as well.

I nodded at her with sympathy I didn’t feel. “I’m sorry, Jayna, but you did the right thing telling me. Does Arthur know how bad off the company really is?”

She sat bolt upright in her chair, eyes wide. “No. He trusted Kenneth. Kenneth talked a good talk, and Arthur never questioned him.” Her eyes drifted to the side. “Arthur was already making noise about moving on to his next big idea, especially when Aphrodite starting slowing down.” She refocused her gaze on me and relaxed her posture. “He created Aphrodite for Libby. It was her vanity company, and it did well in the beginning, but once she lost interest, things went downhill fast. Kenneth was only trying to do what he thought best—at first anyway.”

“I need your help now. I need you to pull the checks or wires or however you transferred the money to Kenneth. Trust me, your assistance will help remove the criminal cloud from over your head, especially with Kenneth unable to back you up.”

She nodded. “I understand. I almost told you before. You seemed like a sharp cookie despite what Doug said about you. Your boss is a real asshole.”

“From time to time,” I said with a rueful smile.

We left Jayna’s office and went to the locked storage area. She opened a file drawer near the one Jon and I had seen Kenneth accessing. Of course that was one drawer we hadn’t had time to dig through. She handed me three files, one marked ‘Dalrymple’, a second marked ‘Elizabethan’, and a third marked ‘Stock options’.

“Everything you need is in these files.”

“I’m going to make copies, then I need you to lock the originals in a new location. Do you understand?”