Innocent Conspiracy

by David Archer

  Steve and Summer looked at one another, then Steve nodded. “He’s making sense,” he said. “Anything else we need here, Walter?”

  Walter shook his head. “No. We need to go back to Sam.”

  They went out to the living room and Steve told Q that they were done. He and Walter went to the elevator, while Summer began knocking on neighboring doors.

  14

  “So, what you’re telling me,” Sam asked, “is that our mystery couple might not have been planning any further attack on Web Wide Awards? Walter, what makes you think that?”

  “Because,” Walter said. “If they were already working on a new plan or had something set up, there should’ve been some kind of evidence of it in the apartment. They weren’t trying to do anything, they were just hiding. They were waiting for some kind of orders, but they hadn’t gotten any yet. If they had other weapons or equipment, it was stored somewhere else, so they may turn up eventually in storage lockers that go unpaid. We’ll know more about it when Q gets into their emails. That was the only means of communication they had, so that has to be how they were supposed to get their orders.”

  Sam leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. “This is probably one of the most confusing cases I’ve ever seen,” he said. “From what little we know so far, I would have bet just about anything they were planning another attack.”

  “There is going to be another attack on somebody,” Walter said. “It just wasn’t ordered yet.”

  Sam had invited Darren to sit in on the conversation, and now he turned to him. “Any thoughts?”

  “I’d have to say that I agree with Walter,” Darren said. “I had already come to the conclusion that these two were underlings, both under the control of some greater alpha. That alpha is still out there, and so far we’ve got nothing to indicate who it might be.”

  Sam bit the inside of his cheek and shook his head. “Denny told me something a couple days ago,” he said. “There’s a European assassin who had been spotted in the U.S. The last time he was seen was in St. Louis, I think, at the airport, maybe. We had come to the conclusion that he probably wasn’t involved in this, but now I’m starting to wonder.”

  He leaned forward to his computer and opened his emails, then found the one Denny had sent him with Reynard’s picture in it. He opened the photo, and then his jaw dropped.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “I am such an idiot. When Indie got the pictures of Schroeder and Jones, the couple who was killed last night, I thought they looked familiar.” He turned the monitor so that the others could see it.

  It was the photo he had looked at before, showing Reynard with a red circle around his face. He was apparently walking with and talking to a man and a woman, and it was obvious they were the same couple from the night before, Juergen Schroeder and Bernadette Jones.

  “There’s our alpha,” Darren said. “Do we have any idea where he is now?”

  Sam shook his head. “Denny said the FBI missed him at St. Louis, and now he’s in the wind. If they were working with him and waiting for orders, then God only knows what they might’ve done next.”

  Darren was leaning close to the monitor. “Is that Pierre Reynard? It is, I recognize him. We used to call him the French Fox, and that’s only partly because of his name. He was always able to sneak into and out of just about anyplace, and anyone he agreed to hit was doomed from that moment on. He was in the States a few years ago, when I was with BAU. We tried every possible way to corner him and take him down, and he always walked away.”

  Sam pulled the monitor around and forwarded the email to Indie. “This is a long shot, but I’m going to see if Herman might be able to find some trace of this guy.” He picked up his phone and dialed his wife.

  “Indie? Babe, I just sent you an email with a photograph. The guy with his face circled in red is apparently the man in charge of this whole thing, an alpha assassin who was actually running the two we got last night. That picture was taken in St. Louis, at the airport there. Do you think there’s any chance Herman could track him down?”

  “I can put him to work on it,” she said. “I’ll start with searching the archives of the St. Louis airport security videos, then move out from there to other cameras close by. I might be able to get some idea of which direction he went, but actually finding him would probably be impossible.”

  “I know that,” Sam said. “I’m just hoping you might pick up some kind of lead on where he went after St. Louis. With any luck, he might’ve gotten onto a plane so we can check its destination.”

  “I’m feeding his photo into Herman now,” she said. “I’ll let you know what he finds. Sam, the time stamp on this photo is from two and half months ago, did you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Sam said. “Again, I’m just hoping to pick up a lead.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

  *

  “I don’t know about you,” Jade said to Stacy, “but I’m about ready for some lunch.”

  “Yes, that sounds good,” Stacy replied with a grin. “Shall we eat in the cafeteria?”

  “Works for me,” Jade said. “The food was pretty good yesterday. I could eat another of those taco salads.”

  “Oh, you should try the chicken with dumplings that I had yesterday,” Stacy said. “It was incredibly good. I’m going to have it again.”

  The two of them got up and left the office they were sharing, which was directly adjacent to Annie Porter’s office. Jade poked her head in to let Annie know where they were going, but the woman was nowhere in sight.

  “It’s lunchtime,” Jade said. “She’ll figure it out. Let’s go.”

  They went to the elevator and rode it down to the third floor, where the cafeteria was located. They could smell the delicious variety of foods as soon as they stepped into the hallway, and Jade couldn’t resist a soft moan of epicurean delight.

  “Oh, I can smell the chicken from here,” she said. “I think you’re right, I’m going to try the chicken and dumplings today.”

  They made it into the cafeteria and both of them were surprised at the number of people who smiled, waved or called their names. A couple of women sitting at a table by themselves motioned for Jade and Stacy to get their trays, then come and sit down. Jade shot back a thumbs up, and they started through the line.

  When they were finished and had paid, they made their way to the table and sat down. The women waiting for them had been friendly since they met the day before, and had even been helpful on a couple of occasions.

  Bridget Bristow, who was short and dumpy with pink hair, reached over and patted Jade on the hand as she sat. “Hey, Jade, how are you doing? Are they driving you crazy yet?”

  Paulette Berkowitz, her friend and coworker in the printing room, rolled her eyes. “Geez, Bridget,” she said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to drive her crazy, she’s Ms. Porter’s assistant. Nobody wants to get on her bad side, right, Jade?”

  Jade chuckled. “I really don’t think it’s as bad as all that,” she said. “Everyone’s been very nice.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Bridget said. “Believe me, it’s not always that way around here.”

  “Oh, really? What do you mean?”

  “She’s just running off at the mouth,” Paulette said. “This is one of the best places I’ve ever worked.”

  “Oh, it’s a great place to work,” Bridget continued. “But not everybody is nice all the time. I mean, you let traffic slow down a little bit, and even Mr. Morton can become quite a bear. Ms. Porter, she’s usually a sweetheart, but I’ve even heard her do some yelling at people now and then.”

  “Which probably means they had it coming,” Paulette said. “Ignore her, dears, she’s our in-house gossip columnist. If there’s anybody in the whole company you got a question about, she can tell you a whole lot more than you want to know.”

  Jade grinned. “Oh, is that so? What can you tell me about Jacqueline Bridges? She was trying to show me
how to do the daily reports earlier, and she seemed so nervous I was afraid she was gonna have a heart attack.”

  Bridget smiled from ear to ear. “Jackie? Oh, my goodness, Jackie is almost always like that. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear the world was fixing to cave in on her pretty much all the time. I’ve tried to talk to her a few times, but it’s all you can do to get her to speak. It’s like she’s scared to death of everything and everybody, I swear.”

  Jade nodded. “That’s pretty much the impression I got,” she said. “And yet, she’s in charge of doing the daily traffic and income reports. It made me wonder if she’s ever made a mistake and gotten in trouble over it, you know?”

  “Well, I won’t say there haven’t been a few discrepancies along the line,” Bridget said conspiratorially, “but she always seems to live through it, somehow. About seven months ago, she got called up to Mr. Morton’s office at the end of the day, something about her totals not matching up to the ones that came out of the accounting office. Usually, getting called up there at the end of the day means you’re out of a job, so we all thought she was gonna get fired, but she was back at her desk the next morning. I don’t think there’s been any issues since then, though.”

  Jade narrowed her eyes. “What about the accounting department? Did anybody get in trouble over there?”

  “Nope. You’d think somebody would have, if it turned out Jackie was right and they were wrong, but nobody had any problems that I heard about.”

  “That does seem kind of odd,” Jade said. The conversation continued for a while as they ate, occasionally touching on other employees that Bridget seemed to have her eye on.

  When lunch was over, Jade and Stacy went back to their office. Jade sat at her computer and started looking at the reports that Jackie submitted every day, and going back over the last year of them. She was surprised to find that some of them had been edited, the totals changed after the report had been submitted, but the computer recorded all the edits as being done by Jackie herself.

  Just as glaring was the fact that, seven months earlier, Jackie had suddenly started submitting her reports an hour later than she had previously done. Prior to that time, her report preceded the report of the accounting office; since then, however, it was always submitted only a minute or two before Jackie would leave for the day.

  Jade switched over to the accounting office and examined their daily totals on the sales ledgers. All of them matched up perfectly to Jackie’s, but in some cases, it matched up to the edited version rather than the original.

  “I think we need to have a talk with Jackie,” Jade whispered to Stacy. “Do you think we’re secure in here?”

  “I would not trust it,” Stacy replied the same way. “I can see at least two dozen places a microphone could be hidden in here. With the technology this company deals with, it would surprise me if they aren’t recording most of their employees.”

  Jade nodded, then got up and walked out of the office. Stacy jumped up to follow as she walked straight to the elevator, then went to the income bookkeeping office where Jackie worked. That was on the fourth floor, only two doors down from the main accounting office.

  She stepped inside and caught Jackie’s attention, then asked the girl to step into the hallway.

  “Hey, Jackie,” she said. “Listen, I want to talk with you some more about what you do, because it’s really interesting, but I have to run a couple of errands. Are you super busy right now?”

  Still nervous, Jackie glanced at her desk, but then she turned to Jade and shook her head. “I’m not real busy,” she said softly. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, I’ve got to run and pick up some medicine from the pharmacy, and I have to do it right now. Would you ride along with me, so we can talk without wasting a lot of time?”

  “Oh, I might get in trouble if I leave…”

  “No, you won’t,” Jade said. “I have plenty of authority over that. Come on, we’ll only be gone a half hour or so. I’ll buy you a Starbucks.”

  The mention of Starbucks actually got a tiny smile out of the girl. “Okay, then,” she said. The three of them, Jade, Stacy, and Jackie, took the elevator to the first floor and walked out toward Jade’s car. They climbed inside and left the parking lot, and Jade looked at Jackie.

  “Why is it that you only file your reports just before you leave for the day?” Jade asked her.

  Jackie turned beet red. “Well, I—I have to,” she said. “Sometimes our totals don’t match up with accounting, and they have to. Mr. Morton said I have to make sure at the end of each day that they match, even if I have to go in the computer and change them, so I just do mine last.”

  “Jackie, do you have any idea why they wouldn’t match up? I mean, you get the same data that accounting does, right?”

  Jackie looked down at her hands, which were fidgeting in her lap. “Maybe we make mistakes,” she mumbled.

  “I don’t think anyone in your office is making any mistakes,” Jade said. “I think your totals are perfect and accurate, and you’re being forced to fudge them because somebody is hiding some money. Am I right?”

  15

  Jackie continued to look at her hands in her lap and said nothing. After a moment, Jade reached over and took one of the girl’s hands in her own.

  “Jackie, do you know where that money is going?” Jade asked softly. “You’re not in any trouble, I promise you. It’s just that my job is to look at everything, and when I saw the edits that change your original totals, that raised a red flag for me. The only reason for you to have to fudge your totals is to make sure they match up with what the accounting department is reporting. The differences don’t look like a whole lot day by day, but over the last six months they’ve added up to well over a million dollars. That’s not enough to make much difference when they file their corporate taxes, so I’m pretty sure that money is being spent, somewhere. If I’m going to do my job properly, then I need to find out where.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said suddenly as tears began to roll down her cheeks. “I don’t have anything to do with where money goes, I just have to watch when it comes in. Everything goes out through accounting, either through payables or disbursements.”

  Jade squeezed her hand. “I told you, you’re not in trouble. Tell me this, why is it there is a separate department to monitor the income? Why isn’t that handled in accounting, too?”

  Jackie swallowed and her face made a grimace. “Mr. Morton says safety comes from redundancy,” she said, “so he wanted to split all the bookkeeping into different parts. My office adds up all the money that comes in, then it goes to accounting, where they double-check it and figure up what part of it is taxable and what part isn’t, then they send it to payables. That’s where the bills get paid from, and after that it goes to disbursements. Disbursements takes care of things like the executive payrolls, travel allowances, bonuses, prize awards, and stuff like that.”

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” Jade said, “but that actually sounds like a recipe for disaster. Are there ever any discrepancies between accounting and payables or disbursements?”

  Jackie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t see those from my computer.”

  “Okay, let’s back up a bit. Do you actually handle any of the money, either in cash or by having control over any specific accounts?”

  Jackie hesitated for a second, then nodded. “Whenever there’s a big local event, like the award show the other night, all the cash from the box office, from merchandise sales, everything, it all comes straight to our office to be counted. A couple of the girls there, they stack all the bills up neatly and put them in the counter, and the change just gets dumped into a machine that sorts it and counts it all at once. When that gets done, it’s all locked into transport boxes, and then the bank sends people over to pick it up with an armored car. That’s the only time we deal with any cash. Everything else, all the money that comes through the internet, goes through
several different PayPal accounts, so we have to check each account and report all the totals, but then it’s up to accounting to transfer the money from there to the appropriate bank accounts.”

  “And you do this every single day, right? The same procedures, over and over?”

  Jackie nodded. “Yeah. It’s boring, but it pays good.”

  “And yet, somehow you seem to make a mistake in the totals every day. Jackie, if that were actually true, you’d probably be fired. When was the last time you got a raise?”

  Jackie’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Three months ago,” she said softly.

  “And you got another one three months before that,” Jade said. “And the month before that, that’s when you started changing when you input your totals. Now, while the missing money might not save the company a lot on their taxes, I’m pretty sure the IRS would get really upset about losing any money at all. How do you think all this would look to them?”

  Jackie slowly raised her face and turned to look Jade in the eye. “It’ll look like I’m the one doing it, won’t it?”

  “Well, on the surface, that’s definitely what it looks like,” Jade said. “If I hadn’t dug a lot deeper, I would’ve thought you were embezzling money. I was still thinking that until a little while ago, when I heard about Mr. Morton calling you into his office. The rumor went around that your totals were wrong and everybody expected you to get fired, but you didn’t. A month later, you got a big raise, and three months later you got another one. That tells me that you were ordered to do something, and you’re being rewarded for obeying orders. That sound about right?”

  A lot of Jackie’s nervousness seemed to be gone. “Ma’am,” she said, “if you tell anybody we had this conversation, I’m probably out of a job. You know that, right? I got kids, I’m just trying to take care of them, and that’s all.”