Chapter 26: The Audit

“Both,” Julian said. “At first.”

Rachel didn’t move.

“The first night, I took you in because you were on my floor shaking and I couldn’t stand it. By four in the morning, when Owen called, I didn’t know what you were. The wife of the man I thought was robbing me, working in my house under another name.” He didn’t dress it up. “I’d be an idiot not to wonder.”

“And now?”

“Neither. Somewhere around the third day I stopped thinking you were in on it. By the dinner I’d stopped feeling sorry for you too. You’d hate that.”

She should have felt better. She mostly felt cold in his shirt.

She turned the laptop around so he could see the top of the screen, and put her finger on the line under the file name.

“Last modified, November fourth,” she said. “That’s Wednesday. That’s the morning we finished taping Michael’s garbage on this rug. The third day was two weeks ago, Julian. Somebody opened this on Wednesday and still left it pending.” She tapped the last line. “Your file disagrees with you.”

He looked at it a long time.

“I never told Owen to close it,” he said finally. “I told myself that was being careful.”

“It was being careful,” Rachel said. “About me.”

She got her clothes off his bedroom floor without looking at the bed, left his shirt folded on the chair, and went down the hall to the guest suite. She turned the lock. It was a cheap little bathroom-style lock in a door that cost more than her car, and she heard it click all the way down to her feet.

At eight o’clock she came out in her black uniform and started the coffee.

“Mr. Cross,” she said, when he came into the kitchen. “There’s coffee.”

“Thank you, Ms. Moore,” he said. He’d learned that much.

* * *

She called Diane Kessler at 8:15 on a Saturday. Kessler listened without saying a word, which Rachel had never heard her do, then said, “Put him on.”

Rachel held the phone out across the island. Julian took it.

When he handed it back, Rachel said her terms to both of them. She’d had two hours in a locked room to get them in order.

“One. The file goes to Diane. All thirty-one pages and whatever Owen has behind it. Two. Anything else you haven’t told me, you write down, and that goes to Diane too. Three. Nobody looks into one more thing about me. Not a parking ticket.” She breathed. “And your audit. You want my eyes on it, I’m not reading it at your dining table in your shirt. I go through Diane. Your general counsel signs off. I get paid, I sign whatever confidentiality thing he wants, and I keep a copy of what I find.”

“Why the paper?” Julian asked. Not arguing. Asking.

“Because there’s a document on that laptop that says I’m a suspect. If I find your money, I want it in writing, with a date and a lawyer’s name on it, that I’m the one who found it. I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this so that file ends different.”

On the phone Kessler said, “I’ll call Richard.”

* * *

Owen came at ten with the audit on a hard drive in a padded envelope, for Kessler’s office, not for her.

Rachel stood in front of him with her arms crossed.

“Page one,” she said. “B-plus average. How did you get my grades?”

Owen looked at Julian. Julian was looking at the floor.

“I called somebody at a background outfit who owed me,” Owen said. “The grades and the VIN came from him. I shouldn’t have asked and he shouldn’t have pulled them. Your phone carrier was me.” He scratched the back of his buzz cut. “And Tessa’s number was me too. Your old F******k. That one I’d do again. The rest I wouldn’t.”

“You put my mother’s cancer in a file with a highlighter.”

“I didn’t highlight that part.”

“Owen.”

“Yeah. I’ll delete what I shouldn’t have. In front of your lawyer. You pick the day.”

* * *

Kessler’s conference room on East 41st Street smelled like printer toner and somebody’s Pret sandwich. Richard came in at two, tall and silver-haired, a Saturday in a cashmere sweater, and slid an engagement letter across the table: retained through Kessler’s office at the direction of counsel, an hourly rate Kessler named and Richard didn’t argue with, a nondisclosure agreement four pages long. Rachel read every page. She’d learned that lesson in April at her own kitchen table.

Then she signed, and Richard left. Julian wasn’t there at all. That was the deal.

The audit was four hundred pages of vendor ledgers and Big Four memos that said, in a hundred polite ways, we found nothing, please pay our invoice. Owen’s notes were all servers and login times. Nobody had read the paper.

Rachel read the paper. Every company lies in its vendors, Mr. Abernathy used to say, tapping the board with his wedding ring. Find out who they pay, and why, and who said yes.

By five she had three names. Bluefin Systems Group. Tarrow Data Partners. Northgate Integration LLC. Delaware registrations, W-9s, clean. They billed on the fourth, the eleventh, and the eighteenth, every month like a babysitter, and every invoice in eighteen months landed between two hundred forty-one and two hundred forty-nine thousand. Under the CFO’s two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar single-signature limit, every time. Real vendors weren’t that polite.

And at the bottom of every invoice, three companies, three logos, three states, the same line in the same font. Payment recieved with thanks.

“Same template, same typo, same person,” Rachel said. “Somebody built three companies and couldn’t spell received.”

Four smaller vendors had the same typo in the fine print. Every approval came out of the CFO’s office. Every payment went to a bank in Wilmington that swept itself empty every Friday at five. The addresses were UPS Stores in Stamford and Newark and a vacant lot in Secaucus. Fourteen million dollars, give or take.

The taped page was back at the penthouse under her mother’s quilt. RM CONSUL. She didn’t say it. Not in a room where Richard’s letter was still warm.

Kessler typed the email herself, to Richard, cc Julian. Analysis prepared by Rachel Moore. Rachel watched her hit send.

* * *

At nine that night she was on the guest-suite bed with the lock turned when his phone rang in the hall.

He didn’t take it to the study. His footsteps stopped right outside her door, and then she heard the click of the speaker.

“Harold,” Julian said, loud enough for the wood.

“Julian.” Old money and dry ice. “Someone has told the board you’re sleeping with your CFO’s wife. Emergency session. Monday, nine a.m.”

Rachel sat up. Keep this up and the board hears who’s sleeping in his guest suite.

Michael had kept his word for once.