“Beautiful place,” I begin. “Incredible.”
“Yup.” She waves a hand, taking in the entire room. “It sure is the real thing. That chair, and this one,” she continues, pointing to mine and hers, “were in the Orsay Museum, until Dads fell in love with them. All this stuff, antique furniture, clocks, art—all stuff Dads and Mom collected. The wallpaper is from the eighteenth century. They say.”
“And now your parents are—?” I pause, wondering.
“Three months in Kenya. So I told them I’d house-sit. Nice, huh? I miss my little place in the South End, but I guess I can handle it.”
“Ah,” I say. This is finally making some sense. “So anyway, Ms. Crofts, we read about you in the paper, of course. And as I’m sure my producer, Franklin, explained, we wondered—”
“I’ll tell you all about it, short version,” Caroline says, “and you can call me Caro.”
I nod, and gesture for her to go on.
“Dads made all of us kids get jobs, every summer. Didn’t matter what we did, we just had to work. Value of a dollar and all. So a couple of summers, I worked at Aztratech. Making copies, stamping papers, folding and stuffing envelopes. And I loved it.”
She stops and smiles. “I guess you’re thinking—she doesn’t look like the secretary type. Yeah, well, I guess not. But no one out there seemed to care how I looked, as long as I got my stuff done. And I did.”
“Anyway, I kept working there summers, and after I got my degree in computer technology, it made sense I’d go back there for a real job. So I set up Web sites and e-mail, as well as the billing systems. I had total access to the computers. And everything was fine. Until…”
Caro pauses, looking up at the ceiling. I look up, too, and notice it’s completely painted with clouds and cherubs, and edged with rococo gilt carvings. Just like home.
“Until,” Caro continues, “I began to notice some of the paperwork, bills and invoices just didn’t reconcile. It was clear Aztratech was sending bogus invoices to a number of pharmacies, and those fake bills showed charges of far more than what the drugs really cost. Then, I found there were two sets of books. One that had the real price of the medicines—that was kept in a separate computer, hidden in another part of the office. After I finally accessed the secret system, I began to realize the charges entered in the main computer were for much more. And I know those prices were what the pharmacies were billing the government.”
I think I get this. I’m in deep, deep mourning for our story. I hate the newspaper. “So you discovered the pharmacies were getting reimbursed by Medicare…” I begin.
“Far more than they actually paid for the stuff,” Caro finishes. “And that’s illegal. That’s orchestrated, deliberate fraud. And so—” she looks up at me “—I told.”
It took Caro almost an hour to finish her story: how her father helped her contact a lawyer, how the lawyer had explained the whistle-blower laws, how Caro would have to testify for the government against her employer. She told me how they’d waited for the U.S. Attorney’s office to look over the files she’d downloaded, the hours of financial questions and explanations that finally led to the federal “false claims” case against Aztratech.
“So, let me ask you,” I finally say slowly. “Who was behind all this, do you know? Whose idea?”
Caro laughs bitterly. “Who’s behind it at Aztratech? That Bible-spouting weasel of a Wes Rasmussen, no doubt in my mind.”
I tuck that away for later, but there’s another question I have to ask.
“Do you know a Brad Foreman?”
“Yeah, I know—knew—Brad,” she says quietly. “Why do you ask?”
“I promise I’ll tell you everything,” I say, leaning toward her. “But just tell me first, what do you know about him?”
Caro uncurls her legs. “When I first had an idea that the—evildoers—” she smiles briefly “—were at work, I had to do some financial digging. I had to get a look at the budget records. That was Brad’s department. And I thought I’d have to sneak, you know, somehow.”
“Yes, so…”
“So,” Caro continues, “when I got to his office, and kinda casually asked about record keeping, I could tell he was curious. I remember he closed the door, and asked me some pretty specific questions. Like he knew.”
“Interesting,” I say. “And so—”
“But here’s the thing,” she goes on. “Brad was actually working to unravel something else. Not false pricing. I tried to get him to tell me what it was, but he wouldn’t.”
“Any idea what it might have been?”
“Nope.” She shakes her head. “And now, he’s dead.”
In the silence, something pops into my mind. “Did he ever talk to you about refinancing his house?”
Caro runs a hand through her spiky hair and looks at me warily. “How would you know that?” she asks.
Do I tell her? I quickly try to size her up. Caro has got to be one of the good guys, right? She’s sacrificed her job to rat out her employers, after all.
“Okay,” I say, hoping I won’t regret it. “Let me fill you in.” And then I open my purse, pull out a stack of papers and give one sheet to Caro. “What does this look like to you?”
She looks at the paper, and back at me. “Um, Bible verse, I guess,” she says, shrugging. “Is there more than that?”
I hand her a second page. “How about this?”
She takes a quick glance. “Bible verse again,” she says. “Some cyber-Sunday-school assignment?”
“Here’s what I think,” I answer slowly. “I think these are not really spams. I think they’re instructions. Instructions disguised as Bible verses. Instructions disguised as spam. Instructions that would easily pass for spam, and would be deleted, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.”
“You mean—sent out like spam, so the sender could be pretty anonymous, but actually targeted to those in the know,” Caro says, nodding. “Maybe those who know to look for the misspellings.” She considers for a moment. “Computerwise, that’s definitely doable. But—instructions about what?”
“Yeah, that was a hard one.” I sigh. “But then I started thinking about all the companies in the files. Brad seemed to be really hot on them, sent them to me and to Mack Briggs, who, remember, was a former SEC chairman. So I wondered, what about some stock thing?”
Caro’s interested. “Like?”
“Like insider-trading instructions.” There, I’ve said it. “Look at these,” I say, spreading a few e-mails on the floor between us. “See how some say ‘a good time to buy,’ and some say ‘a good time to sell’?”
“Yow.” Caro looks at the papers and then back at me. “I see what you mean. ‘A good time to sell’ could mean…” She shrugs. “A good time to sell the stock.”
“That’s what I figured, too,” I agree. “And what if the chapters refer to companies somehow, like a code, and the verses are the stock prices? Like, here, ‘Numbers Chapter One’ means company number one, on some list or something, and then the verses indicate the stock prices. When the ‘number one’ stock hits that price, that’s when you’re supposed to buy or sell.”
“So on this one, it says, ‘a good time to buy.’” Caro’s sitting on the floor now, examining the papers. “And Numbers 1, Verse 56 to 57, means buy company number one, if the price is fifty-six or fifty-seven dollars.”
“Yeah,” I say deliberately. “Yeah.”
There’s a few minutes of silence as both of us page through the e-mails again.
Finally Caro says, “What companies, though? And who’s getting the e-mail?”
“And there’s another big question,” I remind her. “Who’s sending the e-mail?”
“Yeah.” Caro looks up at me inquiringly. “Who?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
We’re quiet again. Both thinking hard, and both mystified. Then all at once, a high-pitched sound pierces the silence.
“Beeper,” I say, sh
aking my head in embarrassment. It’s my stupid new beeper. “Sorry.”
As it continues to bleat its insistent annoying signal, I rifle through though my bag for the black box, wishing I could just throw it out Caro’s thirty-second-story window. I poke the message button, fearing the worst.
It arrives.
Call Angela.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ve got to call the office.” Whatever this is, it’s going to be terrible. I grab my cell phone from my purse and click the green button on.
Nothing. I click it again. Totally dead battery. “Damn it,” I say, tossing the useless thing back into my bag. “I mean, rats. Could I use your…?”
“Phone’s in the kitchen,” Caro says, pointing.
I trudge by the opulently upholstered walls of the penthouse hallway. It feels as if I’m walking through Architectural Digest, but I know I’m on the way to certain doom. “Call Angela,” I mutter. Why on earth would I want to do that? I come to an expanse of stainless steel appliances and pick up the phone.
Newszilla answers immediately, attempting an impossible mixture of sympathy, regret and pomposity. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know you’re with Franklin…”
I don’t tell her I’m not.
“But we need you to handle a news conference for us. Do you want to be picked up at the hospital? Or meet your crew here at the station? It’s at Aztratech Pharmaceuticals,” she says. “In Boxford. In two hours.”
I lean back against the counter for support.
“At…?”
“Reacting to that story in the paper, of course. And since we figured you know all about this anyway,” she says pointedly, “you might as well go cover it. At least you won’t have to play catch-up.”
I can just imagine her self-satisfied expression as she throws my defeat in my face.
“Yup, sure, fine,” I say. I’m in agony. I might as well just put a big L on my chest.
“Three o’clock, Aztratech headquarters,” she repeats. “The speaker will be somebody named Wesley Rasmussen. I assume you at least know who that is.”
I drag my feet through the kitchen, back through the pantry, through the dining room, too depressed to be impressed. “Louis XV, Louis XVI, who cares,” I mutter petulantly. Everything sucks.
I arrive in the living room and open my mouth to tell Caro I have to go.
She’s already talking.
“Check it out,” she says, eyes sparkling. “I think I have an idea.”
“An idea—about what?” I ask tentatively. Please let this be something good.
“Remember I told you Wes Rasmussen is always quoting the Bible? In fact, he had one on his desk all the time, full of yellow stickies that mark his favorite passages or something.”
“Yes,” I say, unsure where this is going. “What about it?”
“The e-mails,” she says. “They look like Bible verses, but you said they aren’t always real ones. Who would know enough about the Bible to use it as a code?” She looks at me eagerly and ticks off her points on her fingers. “You’d have to be familiar with the Bible, incredibly hypocritical to use it to further some illegal insider-trading scheme and arrogant enough to think you could get away with it.”
“In other words…”
“Mr. Wes Rasmussen.” Caro nods. “Absolutely.”
“You’ve got a point, I have to admit,” I answer. I look at my watch. Still a little time to spare.
“How about this,” I begin again. “He’s at Aztratech. That means Aztratech is one of the companies involved. I mean, it makes sense since that’s where Brad worked. And what if Aztratech, it starts with A after all, is number one. As in Numbers, Chapter One.”
Caro sifts through the e-mails and pounces on Numbers, Chapter One. “If that’s true, that would mean the stock price of Aztratech would be somewhere in the fifty-five to fifty-six range. Or would have been, around the date of the e-mail. Which was—” she checks the date line “—three weeks ago.” She smiles. “Before they knew about the lawsuit, of course.”
“And if there were some reason the stock price was going to go up back then—like a new drug going to be approved by the FDA or something,” I add, “Rasmussen couldn’t have profited from purchase or sale of his own stock. But he could have let his compadres know, by way of this secret spam system, and they could have made a ton of money. With no one the wiser.”
Caro leaps up. “Got an idea,” she calls over her shoulder as she leaves the room. “Be right back.”
Alone in the living room, I start thinking about what you could buy with all that money. Boats, shopping malls, racehorses, property. I start thinking about all the companies in the boxes of files. It’s got to be—those are the companies in the insider-trading loop.
Then I remember. The files are missing. And I still haven’t told Franklin.
Caro races back into the room, waving a newspaper. “Let’s just see.” She opens the pages and spreads them out on the floor. “Good thing I’m saving old Boston Globes for Dads while he’s gone. I dug out the one for just after the date of the e-mail.” She runs her finger down the stock tables.
“Aztratech,” she says slowly, “Aztratech.” She flips a page and runs her finger down another list. “Fifty-six,” she says, eyes twinkling behind her glasses. She picks up another paper. “Now, here’s two weeks later.”
I kneel on the floor beside her, eager to see what she’ll find. The paper is a gray-and-black blur. I grab my purse and hunt for my reading glasses. But Caro already has her answer.
She points to the paper so emphatically it actually tears—but it’s still readable. “Aztratech,” Caro reads out loud. “Closed this day at seventy-one.”
I’m trying to do the math. And it’s easy.
“So if someone bought a chunk of it three weeks ago at fifty-six, let’s say,” I begin, “and sold it two weeks later at seventy-one…”
“They’d have made big bucks,” Caro finishes my sentence. “Big, big bucks.”
Chapter Eighteen
G
ood thing there was a Starbucks on the way to Aztratech. I couldn’t face this news conference without a little caffeine courage. It feels as if I’m being sent to detention. Angela, grand master of mind games, certainly wants me to feel that way. Faced with my own defeat. Scooped. Depressing.
I dig into my purse on the seat beside me and pull out my useless lump of a dead cell phone. It beeps as I plug it into the cigarette-lighter thingy to charge it up. Wish there was a way to charge myself up.
As I pull out onto the street, I hear my phone beeping. It’s the voice mail alert—One Message Waiting, it says.
A honking idiot in the car behind me gives me the Boston reminder that the light has changed to green. Instead of giving him the finger back, I hit Message Retrieve, tuck the phone under my chin and pull away as slowly as I can.
The message is from Melanie.
“Hello, Charlie,” she begins. “I just got a call from your Josh Gelston.”
My eyes fly wide open. “He reminded me of that dinner party where he met Brad and me, and said you thought the party was given by Wes Rasmussen.”
I hear Melanie’s soft little laugh.
“I’m not sure why this is so important, Charlie,” she goes on, “but that dinner was not at the Rasmussens’,” she finishes. A pause.
“Oh,” she adds. “The police still think it was kids who did the break-in. I’m feeling a little better about it now. Talk to you soon.”
I click the phone off, and step a toe into uncharted waters, testing the possibilities. If Wes wasn’t the host, then what Josh told me at the diner must have been true. Was all the rest true, too?
I plummet to the depths. It was.
And of course I, Miss Know-It-All, as much as told the most desirable man to cross my path in years that he was a lying dirtbag. I was so vile and sarcastic he actually walked out of the restaurant.
I tap one finger on the steering wheel, planning. Yes. I’ll pull ov
er and give Josh a call. Fix things. Start over. Moving into the outer lane, I scout the highway for a turnoff.
No. I can’t call him. I swerve back into the center. He’s at his Jordan Beach Road house, as he told me in the message, and he told me in the diner there’s no phone up there. Wish I hadn’t ripped up his cell-phone number.
I pound the steering wheel in disappointment. Stewing in frustration, I drive a few more miles until I reach the turnoff for Boxford. Half a mile to humiliation. Mom was right. I should have gone to law school.
Arriving at the Aztratech compound, I find a parking spot, but I stay in my Jeep, seat belt still on. Damned if I’m going in there fifteen minutes early. I scan for the Channel 3 news car and crew. Not here yet. I sigh dismally and take a sip of my finally cool-enough latte.
The blinking phone on the front seat reminds me—I should call Franklin and tell him about Caro and the idea we came up with. Franklin’s going to love it.
By the time my call gets routed from the wrong nurses’ station to some other patient’s room and eventually to Franklin, I only have a few minutes to spare. There’s no time to explain the whole e-mail scheme, but I finally summon the courage to tell him about the files. It’s better like this, anyway. Don’t have to break the ultrabad news face-to-face.
“So, Franko,” I moan, “can you believe it? They’re just not there. I’m so, so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but—”
“Charlotte,” Franklin interrupts, “the files were not stolen.”
“Of course they were,” I interrupt. “You think the trash people mistakenly threw them away or something?”
“I do not think the ‘trash people’ threw them away,” Franklin says. His voice sounds strange. “I’m certain they didn’t, as a matter of fact. Because I took the files.”
I’m speechless.
“Those were the boxes I was putting into my trunk the morning I got nailed in the parking lot. I took the files home so I could compare Brad’s box and Mack Briggs’s box, and do some more research. That’s when I looked up the CEOs’ salaries.”
My mind is racing. “So when they took your car…”
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