Chapter 6 #2
“You can’t change the past. And honestly, I don’t see anything else here that raises any concerns. Certainly not to the point of murder.” He handed the device back to her. “You should keep looking, though. You’d be more inclined to spot something unusual. Especially in hindsight.”
“I haven’t yet.” She sighed and continued going through her emails.
She realized there was a series of them related to the end of the first quarter financial statements.
She turned the screen so Micah could see them.
“There’s discussion about the statements, but no attachments to show what they are.
Do you think this is the prelude to finding the missing money?
You can see they originate with Tabitha. ”
“Could be.” He leaned in to read the message. “You really have no idea how much money the company brings in each month?”
She bit her lip, thinking back. “There was one time I caught a glimpse of a financial statement. I don’t think it was supposed to come to me, so I just forwarded it on to Damien.
That was from six months ago maybe? The bottom line was that they had well over seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the account.
But again, that was a six-month report.”
“If that’s true, then the company brings in one point five million each year.” He arched a brow. “Not bad for a public relations and marketing firm. Not that I’m an expert in that sort of thing.”
“Just because they made that much over six months doesn’t mean that is their income on an annual basis. They could have just had a particularly good year. If I remember correctly, they brought on several new clients over the past year.”
“When did they land the data center account?” Micah asked.
“That was recently. Maybe February? I’d have to look through the emails to say for sure.
” She turned back to her phone and began forwarding several of her messages to her personal account.
It would be easier to read through them with Micah on a laptop compared to a tiny phone screen. “I think—hey, what just happened?”
“What do you mean?”
Bryn tapped her phone screen to access her work email. But all that came up was a message that read access denied.
She sat back in her chair, stunned. “The company just cut of my access.”
“Right now?” Micah scowled. “Do you think they realized you were online and looking at the messages? Maybe Richard does have something to hide. Something he’s worried you’ll realize is important.”
“I don’t know. If Richard was worried about that, why wait until today to cut off my access?
He could have done that the moment I left the office.
Or even before that, when the police took me in for questioning.
” She wondered if Richard had been flagged about her being online.
Deon was their technical support expert.
Deon might have been doing some work when he’d noticed activity on her account.
Yet it was a Saturday. The only people who worked weekends were Richard and Damien.
They didn’t approve overtime for the hourly staff except in extreme cases.
Maybe Richard was working and had noticed her email was still active.
If so, it made sense that he’d sent Deon a message to remove her from the system effective immediately.
She set the phone aside, feeling sick. Being locked out shouldn’t have been a surprise. Richard had fired her. There was no going back, even if she wanted to.
Yet it felt as if the last connection to her previous life had been severed. For good.
“It’s okay.” Micah could tell Bryn was upset. “We’ll figure this out.”
“I hope so.” She stared at the phone as if it were a poisonous snake. “It’s just weird that they shut me out while I was using it.”
The timing was odd, but her logging onto the account could have activated something on their end. It didn’t matter now. Although he still wondered if the data center account was somehow involved.
He glanced at his watch. It was barely seven thirty in the morning. Still too early to head to the store to buy clothes and shoes for Bryn. He rose to his feet to pour more coffee. The idea of reviewing her work emails had been a good one. Now it was time to make a list of the company employees.
If by some chance Damien hadn’t been the one to steal the money, then someone else inside the company had done the task. Maybe someone with the skills to make it look as if Damien had done it. Or worse, made it look as if Bryn was the culprit.
He glanced out the kitchen window to the street running along the front of the property. They’d come in at night; the houses looked different in the light of day.
Maybe he should cruise around the neighborhood again. Check out the make and model of the cars belonging to those who lived in the area. He glanced at the time again and decided they should head out earlier than he’d originally planned.
“I was able to send some of the messages to my home email,” Bryn said. “We can look at those in more detail, although I didn’t notice anything strange when I first scrolled through them.”
“That’s fine.” He tore his gaze from the window. “But I’d also like to keep going through the list of employees. I mean, I did the initial background search, but we should look at other avenues to gain information. Social media, that kind of thing.”
“I doubt anyone would post anything incriminating on social media,” she protested.
“You never know. And it wouldn’t be something obvious, but maybe a connection we could follow up on.” He carried his coffee to the table. “Do you want more?”
“No thanks. I’m already past my limit.” She grimaced.
“We’ll work for a few minutes and then head out.” He sipped his coffee, then set the cup aside. “Show me what you have.”
“I only managed to send a few of them, all related to the data center.” She turned the computer so he could see the screen.
“No other big projects have come in recently?” he asked.
“Nope.” She frowned. “The data center was in the works for a while. Damien was thrilled to have landed the deal.”
He tapped on the mouse pad to go through each of the messages.
The gist of the emails was that the general public was in an uproar over the data center, and the goal was to come up with a marketing and PR strategy to ease their concerns.
He frowned when one message caught his eye.
“The data center is already under construction?”
“Yeah. The construction project was stopped, though, when people started picketing the property.” She eyed him curiously.
“I don’t know why something like a data center would cause something as sinister as murder.
There’s an environmental impact, sure, but that’s not exactly dangerous.
The missing money must be the reason Lori and Damien were murdered. ”
He wondered if someone within the city government got into trouble for approving the data center, then decided she was right.
It did not make sense that a project like that could be the inciting incident.
Unless Damien had taken bribe money? No, that wasn’t logical either.
Damien’s company had been hired by the owner of the data center.
With a sigh, he moved on to the next message. He didn’t want to spin his wheels on something that might not be important. He wished Bryn had sent herself the financial statement so he could look at it for himself, but that document wouldn’t prove anything either.
Would the police have more information to share about the investigation? If so, he doubted they’d be willing to share. He finished going through the messages, then rose to his feet again, feeling restless.
“I can try calling Gwen,” Bryn offered, watching him pace. “She might be willing to tell me what’s going on at the company.”
“You think so?” He turned to look at her. “She’ll confide in you as a friend?”
“Normally yes. I mean, we were good friends, at least I thought so. But when Richard fired me . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away as if embarrassed.
He wondered if she’d ever been fired before.
He had, but that was when he was a teenager.
And in some ways, it didn’t count. The only reason he’d been fired was because he’d been beaten by his father and showed up to work with bruises on his face, including a black eye.
The grocery store manager had assumed he’d gotten into a fight and sent him home, telling him not to bother coming back.
At the time, Micah had been too proud to correct his boss’s erroneous assumption.
He had been in a fight, but it was only in self-defense.
Micah had been a skinny kid at sixteen. Over that next year, he worked out in the gym at school until he was strong enough to defend himself and his mother.
Not that it mattered. His mother had taken off without him anyway.
He understood that being fired from a job as an adult was different. It could make you feel worthless, especially if you didn’t do anything wrong.
After a long moment, she met his gaze. “If I’m being honest, she looked at me with suspicion when Richard walked me out the building. But I’m sure that was mostly because Richard accused me of being involved. Now that she’s had time to think about it, she must realize I’m innocent.”
“That may be so, but keep in mind, we still don’t know what evidence they may have against you.” He kept his tone gentle to soften the blow. “If Damien planned to set you up from the very beginning, he must have implicated you somehow. Otherwise, Richard wouldn’t have let you go.”
“Richard can be a hothead. Gwen knows that. And she knows me,” Bryn insisted. “She knows I’d never steal anything.”
“Bryn.” He stopped pacing and crossed over to her. “You thought you knew Damien and look what happened. We think we know the people we work with, even those we’re friends with, but the truth is that everyone has secrets.”
Her brown eyes bored into his. “Even you?”
“Yeah. Even me.” This wasn’t the time to go into his troubled past. Even her brother Tommy hadn’t known everything.
“Maybe secret is the wrong word, but there are deeply personal things from our past that we don’t readily share with each other.
So as much as you think Gwen knows you, how much do you really know about her?
Or any of your work colleagues for that matter?
” He searched her gaze. “Did you ever anticipate Damien would disappear? Or be accused of embezzling money from the company? Gwen or one of the other employees may have things in their past they haven’t shared with you too. ”
“Okay, fine. You’re right. I guess we only know what people tell us.” She let out a heavy sigh and turned back to the computer screen. “It’s just hard to accept that someone I considered a friend would think the worst about me without a second thought.”
“Try not to stress about things you can’t change.” His heart squeezed at the forlorn expression on her face. “You have your church friends, right? They’ll stand by you.”
“Yeah.” She dropped her gaze to her hands. “Maybe that’s the point. I must admit, this entire experience has been humbling. God must have wanted me to go through this for a reason, right?”
He wasn’t the expert on faith. “I don’t know about that.”
“All this time, I thought my life was good. I had friends, or so I thought. A good job. Then this.” She stared up at him, her gaze troubled. “You’re my only true friend, Micah. I’d be lost without you.” She reached for his hand, clinging to it. “Thanks for being here when I needed you the most.”
Warning signs shrieked in the back of his mind. Bryn was feeling vulnerable right now, and her attachment to him was understandable. He couldn’t afford to read anything into it.
“I’m here for you, Bryn.” He kept his tone light.
“And I’m sure you have other friends too.
” He glanced out the window, trying to think of something reassuring to say.
Instead, a flash of a familiar steel-gray car caught his gaze.
He moved closer, realizing it was the same make and model as the SUV that he’d noticed outside Lori Eastman’s house.
And it was rolling slowly past the rental property. Too slowly.
“We have to go.” He spun from the window. “Now.”
“But my shoes . . .”
“Run in your socks. I mean it, Bryn. We can’t stay.” He mentally kicked himself for lowering his guard, even for a moment. He glanced at her phone, wondering if Richard was behind all of this. The owner of the company could have easily used her phone to pinpoint their location.
And with Damien gone, it suddenly occurred to him that Richard was now the sole owner of the company. Was that the point of this? Maybe. But he’d have to work through that later.
When she reached for her phone, he grabbed her hand. “No, leave it. That may be how we were found.” He swept the laptop off the table and handed it to her. “Hold on to this if you can. If not, drop it, I don’t care. We’re heading out back, the same way we did at Lori’s house, understand?”
“Yes, but where are we going?” Bryn’s voice hitched as she followed him to the back door of the house. Too bad they hadn’t left even earlier for their shopping trip.
It was too late now.
“Away from here. Hurry.” He knew they had only a few minutes of a head start. Not nearly enough time to get far enough away to escape getting caught. Micah silently prayed as he sprinted across the backyard, hauling Bryn along with him.
They’d barely made it halfway across to the property that butted up along theirs when a barrage of gunfire pummeled the rental property behind them.