by Lauren Esker
They stepped out of the car into a gray drizzle, though patches of sun were visible through the clouds not too far away. Fletcher opened the trunk to get out a rain jacket and an umbrella, and offered Debi her choice. She took the umbrella; he shrugged into the jacket.
The rain made the place feel eerie and abandoned as they ducked past the orange plastic construction fencing surrounding the looming hulk of the building. They had to pick their way around puddles and debris. "Watch your step," Fletcher murmured, stepping over a jutting snarl of rebar sticking out of a broken piece of concrete like the legs of an enormous spider.
Near the wall of the gutted building, Debi peered into a concrete shaft that plunged fifteen or twenty feet down to the dark gleam of dimly visible water with pieces of trash floating on the surface. "What's this?"
"Old garbage chute, maybe? Or it could be a shaft for coal. Whatever it is, it's a hazard. And from the amount of water down there, it's been uncovered for, what, months?" He spread out his arms. "This whole place is a hazard. It's obvious that no one's been here for weeks. What the hell did they do, walk away with the job half finished? And yet, we're still paying their wages. Where is that money going, straight into the Sperlins' pockets?"
Debi turned to look at him. In the humidity, her blonde hair was curling into a squiggly frizz around her face. "What if there is no money?"
"Say what, now?"
"You thought someone was stealing supplies off this site because it was being over-billed, right?"
"Yeah," Fletcher said, "and since there's almost nothing here, someone's obviously cleaned us out. We just need to figure out who, and I've got my bet on one particular suspect."
"You said she didn't need the money," Debi pointed out. "Fletcher, what if it was never about trying to steal money at all? What if she's not embezzling, but laundering money through your company?"
Fletcher stared at her. "Say what, now?"
"Think about it. What if a bunch of the paperwork for these job sites isn't real? It's just a shell game, making it look like the usual amount of inventory turnover is going on out here. But since Chloe doesn't know the business as well as you do, she doesn't always get the numbers right. Because they aren't real numbers. She's not really buying and selling anything. She's just shuffling money around on paper so that she can deposit it into Sperlin-Briggs accounts for fake sales and take it out again for fake purchases."
Fletcher barely heard the last few words through the rush of blood pounding in his ears.
He'd built this company through sweat and blood and tears. He'd worked twenty-hour days, poured his heart and soul into it. When Chloe got her family to invest in him and later joined him in turning the company into a real estate powerhouse, he'd thought she was as enthusiastic about it as he was.
What if it was all a shell game? Moving around pieces on a gameboard. Money. Hearts.
Fletcher's hands were starting to shake. He closed them into fists.
"Fletcher?" Debi said softly. She reached out and touched his arm. "Are you all right?"
"We're going back to the office." He turned on his heel and strode toward the car. Debi, even with her long legs, had to struggle to keep up. "We're going over every scrap of paperwork for this and every other job site. Especially the ones I haven't visited in person lately."
This was what he got for building the company so big that he couldn't be personally involved in every aspect anymore. He used to have a hand in everything from the actual, physical work to the purchase orders to the permit battles at City Hall—even emptying the office wastebaskets, dammit. He used to do it all.
And then the company got bigger and bigger, and there was so much more to do. He'd started delegating. He'd handed off day-to-day operation of the construction sites to a few hand-picked foremen, and then gradually it had ended up in the hands of the people those people helped him hire. And Chloe had been a full partner in the company, so he hadn't hesitated to let her handle those decisions as well.
And now this.
All the employees who had been fired or quit lately—was that just Chloe trying to get rid of people who might be able to recognize the telltale signs of the con game she'd been running?
At the car, Debi caught Fletcher's arm. "I have some advice. Are you willing to listen to it?"
"Yeah." He scrubbed his hand over his face, brushing away rainwater, trying to get himself under control. "Yeah. I'm listening."
"Don't tip your hand." Debi's face under the umbrella was intense and serious, the green of her eyes deepened by the dark weather to a rich emerald. "If she knows you know what she's doing, she can hide the evidence before you can do anything about it. Worse, she might try to turn it around and pin the blame on you."
God. He could see that all too easily, especially since Chloe had been comparatively hands-off at the company lately. "So what do I do, just let her get away with—"
"Of course not. You go in sneaky and smart. You find the evidence and build a case and drop it on her head all at once." Debi smiled grimly, showing an even row of white teeth that somehow seemed a little sharper than most people's. "If there's one thing my big brother taught me, it's how to get back at people who hurt you."
The anger began to ebb, leaving him exhausted. "I don't even want to get back at her. I just want my company and my daughter."
"Oh, Fletcher." Debi folded the umbrella and wrapped her arms around him, heedless of the rain falling on them both. "It'll be okay. There's a way through this."
She rubbed her hand up and down his back. It was easier than he'd expected to relax into her embrace. All his life, he'd dealt with things on his own. He'd presented a brave face to the world because he knew that if he didn't, the sharks of the business world would eat him alive. Never show weakness. Never show how much you care about anything.
But with Debi ...
She knew how much the company meant to him, how much Olivia meant to him. In Chloe's hands, those small truths were weapons. He kept trying to tell himself that he couldn't trust Debi with them, but his heart knew what his head couldn't quite believe: that his secrets, and his heart, were safe with her.
She'd trusted him about the tracking monitor, he reminded himself. It went both ways.
Debi gave a sudden, soft laugh against his shoulder.
"What?" He pulled back, looking quizzically into her face. With both of them wearing work boots, she wasn't quite as tall as he was used to; only a couple of inches separated them.
"We're getting awfully wet out here." She patted her hair, trying to smooth down the increasingly unruly blonde frizz—which made Fletcher aware of what his hair was probably doing.
He touched his head and sighed at the familiar feeling of a springy curl working its way loose to sproing off his head in a random direction.
"I don't know why you hate these so much." Debi reached out to twist her finger lightly in one of his escaping curls. "I think they're cute. I'm the one who's turning into a mess out here."
"Are you kidding?" He stroked her hair, smoothed his fingers through the thick waves of her ponytail. "You look amazing."
"Fletcher, I'm soaking wet and covered in mud."
He had to laugh at this. "If I can't stand the sight of a beautiful woman who's wet and covered in mud, I think I'd better turn in my guy license."
Debi twitched out a damp tail of the plaid shirt, untucking it from her slacks. "You like the lumberjack look, do you?"
"I like any look on you," he answered honestly. "This look. The way you normally look. It's all gorgeous."
"Flatterer." She touched the side of his face. "You'll think about what I said? Play your cards close to the vest. Don't confront anyone until you have something bulletproof to confront them with."
"I've got it. And you're right." He opened the car door. "C'mon, let's get out of the rain like sensible people."
***
Debi's damp clothes had, for the most part, dried out by the time they reached downtown. Fletcher offered t
o take her back to her place so she could change, but she decided that it wouldn't hurt her to go into his office in her current state. She was only going to be in the back room all day anyway. Anyone in her pride would be shocked to see her in an ill-fitting plaid shirt and muddy boots, but they could just suck it.
She had forgotten about the office manager, Janice, but all Janice did was give Fletcher an amused look. "Out on a job site?"
"You know how I love it," Fletcher said with a smile—somewhat forced, from Debi's point of view, but Janice didn't seem to notice anything. "Hey, did we ever get the permits to do the work on that place up in Everett?"
Debi left him talking to Janice about building permits and slipped off to the bookkeeping office to get to work. By now it was starting to feel like she had an established routine in this place. She'd gotten to know the ins and outs of the bookkeeping system, and Janice ordered lunch and brought it by Debi's office in early afternoon.
This would be a nice place to work. I don't have to stay with Chang & Luntz, after all.
But, no—given how things were currently going with Fletcher, being his employee would be a fraught situation indeed. Besides ... there was no telling if the business would even still exist in a few weeks.
She'd worked with a few businesses in the past that had had problems with employees skimming money, but auditing a business that might be a front for money laundering was something she'd never done before. It posed an interesting set of thought problems. What would the paper trail look like? What would you need in order to prove it?
By late afternoon, she was increasingly confident that their suspicions were right. The basic idea with money laundering was to take money obtained in some illegal way—drugs, gambling, or other illegal sources—and make it look like it came from a legitimate source. So Chloe, or whoever, had been putting in paperwork for real estate transactions that either didn't exist or had their sales price vastly inflated over what they should have been, depositing the money into the Sperlin-Briggs accounts, then withdrawing it for fake materials purchases—at which point she would presumably squirrel it away in accounts that Fletcher didn't have access to.
The cashflow problems Debi had noticed earlier were happening in part because Fletcher was treating Chloe's fake financial transactions like real ones, buying and selling while depending on money that Chloe was only temporarily storing in the Sperlin-Briggs accounts before moving it elsewhere.
And the other problem was that a number of files had been deleted from the database. Someone had been messing around in here. It was impossible to know what was missing, but no wonder things hadn't been adding up right.
One thing that was consistent across most of the fraudulent receipts and database modifications was that they all used Fletcher's signature and Fletcher's login. Debi might have suspected Fletcher herself if she hadn't known him so well by now, and anyway, his shock had been genuine.
But of course, a wife would have her husband's login information; a wife would know how to forge his signature.
Oh, you're going down, Chloe, Debi thought grimly.
She Xeroxed any receipts that she couldn't easily verify, printed out every transaction that she wanted to check later, and stashed them in a series of folders labeled 2008-2012 Vehicle Inspection Reports in the hopes that no one would look too closely. The folders grew fatter and fatter as the afternoon wore on. This was going to be a huge job. At least there was a weekend coming up, and as usual she had no plans, so she could take as many of these files home with her as she could carry. Now that she had the logins to the accounting system, she could access it from home, and she could spend the weekend cross-referencing things. She was actually looking forward to it. At the very least, it would be an improvement over spending the weekend watching TV and drinking.
She was taking a break to stretch her aching spine when voices out in the hall drew her attention. Debi crossed the room quietly and peeked out the half-open door.
Fletcher was down on his knees in front of a tiny raincoat-clad figure who could only be Olivia. Chloe stood behind the child with her hands on Olivia's shoulders. She and Fletcher were talking too quietly for Debi to make out the words, but she could tell by Fletcher's tension that he was fighting for self-control.
Be smart, Fletcher. If you play this wrong, you'll lose everything.
Apparently Fletcher was thinking along similar lines. His smiles were strained, but his voice stayed soft, and from Chloe's reactions, he wasn't saying anything inflammatory. She handed him a child's backpack, gave Olivia a quick hug, and left.
Debi waited until she was gone before coming out. Olivia squeaked at the sight of her and hid behind Fletcher, whose strained grin relaxed into something more natural.
Debi crouched down. "Hi, Olivia. Remember me? I'm Debi. We played house in the conference room."
Olivia peered around her father, and whispered, "You have an ankle bracelet."
"I do." With a quick glance at the door to make sure Janice wasn't around, she lifted her pants leg so Olivia could see it.
"I want an ankle bracelet," Olivia told her father.
Fletcher laughed. He stood up and swept up Olivia in one arm. "If you want one, you can have one. It won't be exactly like hers, though." To Debi, he said, "C'mon, let's get out of here."
She couldn't help smiling. His happiness was infectious. "It's barely even quitting time. Where is Fletcher Briggs and what have you done with him?"
"Fletcher Briggs has a whole weekend coming up with this little morsel—" He faked gnawing on Olivia's neck, making her squeal and giggle. "And," he said over the top of her curly head, his smile turning into something soft and tentative, "if you want to spend the weekend with us, I'd very much like you to."
All she could get out was a small "Oh." Her plan to spend the weekend going over files lurched and fell flat. "Are you sure I wouldn't be in your way?"
"Not in the slightest. Not ever."
Debi brushed her hands over her hair, painfully aware of the tangles it had dried into. She felt suddenly awkward and underdressed. "Do you mean ... tonight?"
"I mean I can run you by your apartment and you can pick up some things to spend the weekend at my place with Livvy and me. If you want to."
"I do," she said, breaking into a grin. "Yes, I do."
"Oh, before I forget." Fletcher freed a hand from Olivia to take something out of his pocket. "Here. I've been meaning to give you this."
He dropped a key into her hand; she looked at it in surprise. "What's this for?"
"The office. If you're working late all the time, you should be able to get in and out on your own." His smile was slightly rueful. "Since I've given you a bunch more work lately."
"I don't mind." She pocketed the key; it clinked against the emerald ring, which she'd almost forgotten about. Smiling, she slipped the ring onto her finger. "Now what do you say we get out of here? We've got a weekend coming up."
Chapter Nine
Tucked into a car seat in Fletcher's backseat, Olivia was quiet on the drive to Debi's, and subsequently to Fletcher's. Once they got back to Fletcher's apartment, she giggled at Debi and ran off to her bedroom with her backpack clutched in her arms.
"So one thing I didn't think through," Fletcher said, shifting Debi's suitcase to his other hand, "is that there's no guest bedroom. It's a two-bedroom apartment. I could make up the couch for you, or we could, uh, share."
"I assumed we were going to be sharing. We did last night, after all." Debi glanced at the door to Olivia's room and lowered her voice. "Do you think it'll bother her?"
"She's four. I doubt if she'll figure out the nuances." Fletcher led the way into the bedroom. "In that case, you can have a couple drawers here—let me clear out some space for you."
While he did that, Debi sat on the end of the bed. She picked at a loose thread on her knee, then picked at the bedspread, then sat on her hands. There's nothing to be nervous about. Don't be ridiculous.
"Is everything o
kay?" Fletcher asked over his shoulder.
"I thought Olivia was warming up to me, but now I feel like we've taken a huge step backward. I don't think she likes me very much." She hadn't meant to blurt it out, but trying not to think about it felt like ignoring the elephant in the room.
"She's just shy. She hasn't been around very many people," Fletcher explained, moving a handful of socks to the next drawer down. "She's hardly even talked to anyone besides me and Chloe's family and the other kids in her daycare—which isn't a big daycare, just a few kids that a shifter mom takes in along with her own. Or ... it was her daycare, until we got dropped because Chloe never bothered to call them before keeping her home for the day." His jaw clenched before he shook off the frustration. "Anyway, we can't really take her out, or have her around humans much at all. Not even to the grocery store, if it's possible to avoid it. She shifts at the drop of a hat. Especially when she's stressed, which is her default state around strangers."
"She'll learn self-control," Debi said. "She's just young."
Fletcher turned around, leaning a hip against the dresser. "How did your family handle it? If you can't go out in public or send them to school, what's the usual thing for shifters to do with their kids?" He half-smiled. "Chloe was never very forthcoming with details."
"It depends on the shifters. A lot of us don't start shifting until we're grade-school age, and by that time we're old enough to know when it's appropriate. It's a little like toilet training. Some kids are later bloomers than others, but eventually they all figure it out."
"That's reassuring. So what were you? Late bloomer?"
"I was six when I shifted for the first time. About typical for lion shifters, as far as I know."
She could still remember it so clearly, the initial confusion as the world blew up around her—sounds becoming sharper, smells more intense, colors oddly muted, her whole bedroom growing to giant size—followed by fascination. She hadn't wanted to shift back; she just wanted to prowl around the entire house sniffing at things. Mara and Rory had shifted to keep her company. It was the first time she'd truly experienced the camaraderie of the pride.
