Chapter Thirty-Three
Some families gather around a television and watch whatever the latest number-one miniseries is until someone cries uncle after six back-to-back episodes, and everyone drags their asses to bed.
Not the Stone family.
Wearing yoga pants and T-shirts, Alex and Piper had every file from all three safes scattered all over the great room.
Two days after Alex’s conversation with Melissa, Max and Sarah had returned home with the not-so-surprising news of their engagement.
And sadly, the way the news was being celebrated was by following the bouncing ball Aaron had left behind.
Sarah’s background in journalism made her the perfect fit for researching the current state of the companies that were named in the CIM files.
Hawk had found a giant scratch pad and had lined out their list of suspects. From the teddy bear, Play-Doh bomber, to Melissa, Yarros, and Floyd. He even put a faceless question mark over a silhouette picture to indicate there may be a player they weren’t aware of.
Chase and Max were actively counting, and making accounts for, the money from the safes.
And Alex felt that they were a breath away from a breakthrough.
She fisted the original CIMs of Stone Holdings, which was purchased six years ago, and explained how the company came to be to Sarah.
“The CIMs in the safe for FassCo, the food distribution company that Dad bought and changed the name to Stone Holdings, show one location on the chopping block.”
“Kansas City,” Max said from where he sat counting money. “I told you about it, Sarah.”
“We have a management company running the business,” Alex said.
“Running it into the ground,” Max pointed out.
“Except they are doing well in the Indiana and Georgia centers.”
“Tell that to the employees in Missouri that are losing their jobs,” Max said.
“Being the boss means making hard decisions.”
Max nodded in agreement.
“Whose name is this?” Sarah turned a paper from the CIM report around. “P. Lexington?”
Alex shrugged.
“Max?”
“No idea. That isn’t a name I heard of when I was there.”
“I think I’ve seen that name before.” Piper leaned across the coffee table and started to dig. “Here it is.”
“Which company is that?”
“A-Star Rentals.”
“The luxury rental cars?” Hawk asked.
“One and the same,” Alex told him.
“Stone Enterprises owns that?”
“Technically it’s a separate company. Just like Stone Holdings. If the company goes down, it doesn’t take Stone Enterprises with it.” Alex typed into her laptop and pulled up the short details of A-Star Rentals. “The company was purchased five years ago,” Alex announced.
“Who manages it?” Hawk asked.
Piper and Alex responded at the same time. “Via Corp.”
Hawk moved to Alex’s side. “Are there any car rental sites that are losing money?”
“If I remember right, there were two locations that were closed down two ... maybe three years ago,” Piper told them.
“I found a Philip Lexington, CPA, in the employee roster at Via Corp,” Sarah told them.
Alex did a search through the CEO email in hopes of finding some communication between her father and this man. “No emails from him.”
Piper pushed to her feet. “We should be checking Aaron’s home computer. If something dirty was going on, it probably wouldn’t be linked from ‘I Am the Boss at Fraud dot com.’”
Alex followed Piper into her father’s office and pulled a chair beside the desk.
Piper logged in and started poking around.
“I doubt Dad left anything self-incriminating on his personal computer,” Alex said.
Piper ran searches in Aaron’s email.
Nothing.
Then in his documents.
“Lexington.Gatlin.doc” stood out like a dog in a cat shelter.
Alex and Piper stayed silent as the document was opened, and they both scanned what it said.
Alex slowly started to smile. “Is this our smoking gun?”
Piper hit the print button. “Your dad certainly wants it to look that way.”
Back in the living room, Alex handed the documents over to Hawk.
“Dad kept copies of emails back and forth from Floyd Gatlin and Philip Lexington. Emails that suggest Floyd was working with Lexington to skim off the top of corporate profits from portions of the companies in question. Stone Holdings, Kansas City. A-Star Rentals, Miami and Houston.”
“That would show where the money in the safes came from,” Chase said. “My guess is that cash was used to bribe the employees to cook the CIMs or to make the sales go through.”
“With everything indicating Floyd was behind it all.” Alex rubbed her temple.
“I have one big problem with that,” Hawk said as he pointed to the piles of cash. “Your dad had the money.”
“He also had a passport with Floyd’s name and his face,” Chase said.
Piper walked back into the room with more papers. “I found more,” she said.
Alex took the documents.
“Gatlin and Sparrow. Gatlin and Mason Beef Company. Gatlin and Ricco Farms. We don’t own any of these,” Alex said.
Piper reached for the documents she’d been looking at before they went on the email quest. “They are from companies Gatlin was ‘encouraging,’ with monetary compensation, to cook the CIM reports so the businesses were sold at a much lower rate than market value.”
“But if we didn’t buy those companies, who was he bribing them for?” Alex asked.
“Good question. Sparrow, Mason Beef, and Ricco Farms were all sold to different companies.”
“Dad was setting Floyd up for the fall if he was caught,” Chase concluded.
Hawk nodded.
“Do you think Floyd knew about any of this?” Sarah asked.
“Maybe. It would explain his hunger to get into the CEO chair by any means possible. He’d be able to use the position to cover things up. Move the evidence pointing at him toward someone else,” Chase said.
“If he knew about the setup, he has to be on our list of suspects in regard to the threats toward Alex.” Hawk glanced at Alex.
Alex sighed. “Floyd has been nothing but nerves since we took over the company.”
Hawk walked over to his flip notes. “If your father was setting Floyd up, there’s going to be a money trail directly to him.
Or ... a safe with money in it that only Floyd could have access to.
And since we have a passport from UAE, I’d bet a hundred bucks we find a Floyd Gatlin bank account there. ”
Max, who had been observing the conversation without commentary, added his two very observant cents in.
“We still don’t know why. Why did Aaron drum up this elaborate scheme to skim off the top of his own company? Or bribe other companies to sell to anyone else? And why stop with Stone Holdings or A-Star Rentals?”
Everyone looked at each other.
No one had an answer.
“These are people’s lives he was fucking with,” Max spat out. “Families who depended on their jobs to feed their kids. It’s one thing if a business fails regardless of the efforts to keep it afloat. It’s another to purposely screw it over and put people out of work.”
Alex glanced at Chase. “We told you Dad was an asshole.”
Hawk lifted a pen and circled names on his giant paper.
“After the conversation with Melissa, we have reason to believe that Yarros knew about the Italy safe, and maybe even these incriminating documents inside. He dumps his shares on the unsuspecting stepmother and goes off to run his own business. Melissa ... did she know your dad was skimming funds? Did she know anything about Aaron setting Floyd up?” Hawk circled Floyd’s name.
“Our bundle of nerves knows more than he is letting on. Maybe he knew Aaron was setting him up. Men like him break under the right pressure.”
Alex narrowed her gaze. “What kind of pressure?”
“The kind Fitzpatrick can provide. And if they’re not successful ...”
Alex shook her head. “We’re not the bad guys. We’re not stooping to their level.”
Hawk put the pen down and moved in front of her.
With both hands on her shoulders, he looked directly in her eyes.
“Someone out there has threatened you. Frightened you and taken away the freedom of moving around without worry of assault or worse. If I have to have a ‘persuasive conversation’ with a not-so-innocent person to find out who that is ...” Hawk shrugged.
“I’m with Hawk on this one,” Max added.
Alex looked at Chase.
“I punched your prom date,” Chase reminded her.
She grinned. “It was homecoming.”
Alex woke to a text from Melissa.
All it said was He knew before I did.
No details, but all the confirmation they needed as to what happened to the money and what it had been used for.
If Yarros knew about the money, he might have known about the blackmail and skimming.
Just because there weren’t any guns pointing at Starfield hotels, that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Alex had to remind herself that while she and the family were playing junior FBI agents, they were way out of their league in truly investigating everything.
Maybe Starfield had a much greater potential for profitability than the CIMs suggested, and Yarros knew it. Which was why he used Melissa to take the money in the safe to pay for his shares in Stone Enterprises.
It all made sense in Alex’s head.
She’d lay bets that Yarros knew her father was up to something that jeopardized the company, which was why he wanted out and was willing to sell his shares to Melissa at a reduced rate.
The pieces were falling into place.
Alex, Hawk, and Chase arrived at the office together and left together the entire week.
The tabloids were rerunning the “Stone Heirs” stories and encouraging Hollywood to make a miniseries.
As ridiculous as that sounded, Alex welcomed the media questions and poking around.
Nothing new had happened in the days following the sick gift.
Everyone in the family agreed to give Fitzpatrick time to investigate what they had to work with to see if Floyd or Yarros broke under the questioning.
They all knew that time was getting short on how long they could keep the fraudulent business practices of their father to themselves.
There was a very real possibility that the feds or CIA would come in and stop operations to investigate.