Chapter 12 #2
Slowly, I moved toward him. He had plenty of time to move away, but instead, he lowered his head so I could brush my mouth against his.
As before, his soft, pouty lips were a balm.
The scratch of his facial hair reminded me how fucking sexy men were, and Anders was a damn fine example of it.
My hand found its way to his hair. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to run my fingers through the long strands.
That fantasy would have to wait for another night.
“Goodnight,” I whispered. If I didn’t go now, I might not be able to make myself walk away. I took the keys from his hand and unlocked the door. “See you in the morning.”
Anders slipped inside, and I waited until I heard the soft snick of the lock. With the barrier between us, I realized one undeniable fact.
When Anders wasn’t next to me, I was lonely.
“Good morning.”
Anders’s light knock on my door at seven woke me from a dream that left me panting and wanting more.
In the dream, Anders wasn’t on the other side of the door.
He was in my bed, next to me, letting me do unspeakable things to his body.
Now that I’d had a taste of him, however small, I couldn’t get the moment out of my head.
It rattled around all night and kept me awake until I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
After my shower, I followed the sounds into the kitchen.
Anders was there, putting together French toast and bacon.
The flash of his smile when I entered the room was a gut punch.
How that fucking dickhead had taken everything Anders was and tried to grind it down was beyond me, but I was damn sure going to pick up the pieces.
I sat at the counter where I could watch him work, and he immediately pivoted to the coffee pot.
He made it better than I ever did. When he set the mug in front of me, I took a slow sip and kept watching him.
For a big man, he was graceful and smooth.
Nothing about him was awkward. When he turned away, I had a perfect view of his broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. His long hair was pulled into a neat topknot.
One of these days, I’d get to see it down in all its glory.
“Did you sleep well?”
Anders opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. “For the most part.”
“What was the part you didn’t sleep well over?”
“Sometimes my imagination runs wild.” His tone made it clear that part of the conversation was closed, so I let it drop.
“What’s on your agenda for today?”
“I’m doing my final review of the files you gave me last week. What about you?”
“I have a meeting this afternoon, so I’ll be leaving this morning, but I’ll be back tonight.”
“You have a meeting on a Saturday?”
“Yeah. We wanted to make sure there’d be no one in the office to distract from the conversation.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It is. I don’t appreciate anyone fucking with my business.” I took another sip of my coffee, but his words finally registered in my brain.
“What did you say you were doing?”
Anders turned around with a plate of French toast in hand, setting it in front of me. He silently placed a pitcher of warmed syrup next to my hands.
“Finishing the file?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Yes, but it won’t take more than a few hours, and I don’t have anything else to do.” Anders fiddled with the dishtowel on the counter. His own plate of breakfast sat, ignored, next to him.
“New rule. You have weekends off. You’re not working yourself into an early grave.
There’s nothing that can’t wait.” Anders looked genuinely panicked, and his breathing immediately turned harsh.
The dish towel he’d been fiddling with now twisted into a tight tourniquet.
Shit. “I need you to do something for me.”
Anders’s fast breathing slowed down a fraction.
Think fast, Magnuson.
“I’ve been thinking there’s not enough local art here at the house. I need you to scope out downtown for some art I can purchase to make this place feel less generic. The designer I hired wasn’t local, and now I see that was a mistake.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“Thank you for coming in on a Saturday. I appreciate you taking the time.”
The forensic team from the accounting firm I’d hired for the merger looked around the table, their expressions uniformly attentive.
Maybe it was because they were accountants, but not a single one of them smiled.
They were dressed like they were headed to testify in court. The overall vibe was not great.
“It’s not a problem under the circumstances,” the woman who appeared to be the spokesperson said. “It’s best we do this when the offices are closed.” She paused, then added, “Mr. Nicholy and I are with the forensic accounting team. Mr. Freeman is from legal.”
“Then let’s get to it. What did you find?”
She opened a folder and slid it across the table. It was thick with paper, but the name on the first page jumped out immediately.
“Are you familiar with an employee named Anders at the firm?” she asked.
“Yes. I’ve heard of him.” They didn’t need to know how familiar I was with that particular employee.
“He’s the dedicated access point for the firm’s charity projects. In fact, he’s the only person who ever accesses those files. That account is being used as a pass-through to remove money.”
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting is that he logged into particular files at very specific times from a specific computer.
When we traced the logins, they occurred at times when it would be unusual for him to be in the office.
More importantly, when we cross-referenced those times with the electronic key system, his badge was never used. ”
The group remained grim-faced, which made it hard to tell where this was going.
“Is he involved in this?”
“On paper, yes,” the spokeswoman said. The phrasing was deliberate. “When we cross-referenced his logins with documents related to the merger, there was overlap. Again, all at unusual times. All from the same workstation. And never when his key card had been used.”
“Wait. You said the same workstation?”
One of the men passed me another folder. I opened it and exhaled slowly.
“Translate this into something that doesn’t sound like a tech lecture.”
“Unlike television, we can’t just isolate an IP address and call it a day,” he said. “What we do instead is triangulate behavior across multiple data points. Login timing, device signatures, access patterns. Taken together, we can say with confidence it’s the same person using the same device.”
He flipped a page.
“Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?”
“The simplest answer is usually the right one.”
“Yes. And when every data point points to the same employee every single time, it starts to look very clean. Too clean. That’s why we cross-checked the keycard logs.”
The spokeswoman picked up again. “Anders’s badge was never used during any of the access windows, but his boyfriend’s badge was.”
The room went quiet.
“That leaves two possibilities,” she continued. “Either Anders took his boyfriend’s badge and used his own credentials to steal from the company, or someone else used Anders’s credentials to hide their own activity and didn’t account for the badge system.”
“The simplest answer is usually the truth,” I said again. “What about the merger documents?”
“They’re largely false,” she said after taking a deep breath. “They were structured to conceal the company’s actual debt. Cash flow was being siphoned off while liabilities were shuffled to mask it. There’s clear evidence the documents were materially untruthful.”
“How was this missed?” I asked.
The two accountants exchanged glances. Mr. Freeman sat stone-faced. No one spoke.
“I asked a question.”
“It should have been caught,” the spokeswoman said carefully. “The documents were signed off by an associate at our firm. That associate is no longer with us.”
“Were they fired over this?”
“They were terminated for failing to disclose a personal relationship with a client.”
I leaned back. “Does that client work for the company whose books they signed off on?”
“Yes.”
The leader struggled to maintain her neutral expression. I glanced at Mr. Freeman instead. He was a closed door.
“Mr. Freeman,” I said, “I’m going to make an assumption that this is a situation we’d both prefer to keep in-house. Is that correct?”
“It is.”