Love Irresistibly

Eight



BROOKE HAD JUST finished reviewing the most recent bill they’d received from Gray & Dallas, the law firm they used to handle their employment and labor matters, when her secretary buzzed her.

“Keith is here to see you.”

“Thanks, Lindsey. Send him in.”

She set the bill on her desk, the businesswoman in her wincing at the amount. Unfortunately, it was a necessary expense, at least with the current setup of Sterling’s in-house legal department—a “department” that consisted of herself, one paralegal, and her assistant. Because they were all so swamped, Brooke and Ian had made the decision that most employment and litigation matters would be farmed out to outside counsel.

Her door opened and Keith, Sterling’s vice president of security, walked into her office carrying a file. He’d called her earlier this morning, saying that he wanted to discuss a confidential matter. Typically, that meant somebody at one of the restaurants was up to no good.

Hopefully not another employee stealing credit cards, Brooke mused. Or any sort of headache-inducing “oops moment,” like the time one of the restaurant managers called to ask if he could fire a line cook after discovering that the man was a convicted murderer.

“Jeez. How’d you learn that?” Brooke had asked.

“He made a joke to one of the waiters about honing his cooking skills in prison. The waiter asked what he’d been serving time for, and he said, ‘Murder.’”

“I bet that put an end to the conversation real fast. And yes, you can fire him,” Brooke had said. “Obviously, he lied on his employment application.” All of Sterling’s employees, regardless of job position, were required to answer whether they’d ever been convicted of a crime involving “violence, deceit, or theft.” Pretty safe to say that murder qualified.

Ten minutes later, the manager had called her back.

“Um . . . what if he didn’t exactly lie? I just double-checked his application, and as it turns out, he did check the box for having been convicted of a crime.”

Brooke had paused at that. “And then the next question, where we ask what crime he’d been convicted for, what did he write?”

“Uh . . . ‘second-degree murder.’”

“I see. Just a crazy suggestion here, Cory, but you might want to start reading these applications a little more closely before making employment offers.”

“Please don’t fire me.”

Brooke had thunked her head against the desk, silently going all Jerry Maguire—Help me, help you—on the manager.

But she’d handled it, just like she would handle whatever it was that brought Keith from security into her office today.

“You sounded serious on the phone,” she said as he took a seat in one of the empty chairs in front of her desk. “Should I be nervous?”

“No. But I do think you’re going to be pissed. I sure am.”

Brooke didn’t like the sound of that intro. “Tell me.”

Keith crossed his legs, settling in. “The other day, I got a call from our account representative at Citibank, letting me know that there had been a breach in our employee purchasing card online database.”

Definitely off to a good start toward pissing her off. All corporate employees at Sterling, as well as the managers, assistant managers, chefs, sous-chefs, and wine sommeliers who worked at the various restaurants and sports arenas, were given a Citibank company purchasing card for business-related expenses. “Is someone charging extra expenses to that account?”

Keith shook his head. “It’s not a theft issue. It seems as though somebody has an ax to grind with Ian. Someone hacked into his account and altered the descriptions of some of his expenses.”

Brooke cocked her head, not following. “Just the descriptions? Why would anyone want to do that?”

Keith pulled a document out of his file folder and slid it across her desk. “Perhaps this will answer that.”

She picked up the pages, a spreadsheet she was familiar with. Whenever a Sterling employee charged something to his or her purchasing card, they were required to enter into the Citibank database a brief explanation of the business expense, such as “Dinner with the L.A. Arena lawyers.” Brooke skimmed through Ian’s May expenses, not seeing anything out of the ordinary until she got to the entries for a business trip he’d taken to Los Angeles to look at some potential restaurant space, a possible expansion for Sterling now that the company had a presence in L.A. via the sports and entertainment division.

Then there was no missing the changes.

Dinner in L.A. with some of my faggot friends.

Picked up a queer dude in tight pants and bought him drinks before bringing him back to my pansy-ass hotel suite.

Cab fare to “Sperm-Burpers Anonymous” meeting.

And so on.

It was safe to say that Brooke had moved beyond pissed at that point. “Pissed” was how she felt the time someone let their dog poop on the sidewalk in front of her building and she stepped in it while climbing into a cab wearing three-inch heels. But breaking into company records and writing homophobic slurs against her boss? That was whole different ball game.

She set the spreadsheet off to the side. “Do we know who did this?”

“No, although we at least know how he did it,” Keith said. “As soon as I saw this, I talked to the managers about all recent terminations, anyone who might have expressed anger at Ian or Sterling in general. There was nothing in particular that jumped out at anyone. But what occurred to us is that only Ian or his secretary should have had access to his online expense files.”

“I can’t believe Liz would’ve had anything to do with this,” Brooke said. Ian’s assistant had been with him for years.

“Not intentionally, no. But as it turns out, she never changed her password from the default one we’d assigned to all employees back when we updated everyone’s computers to the new software. She’s still been using ‘Sterling 1-2-3’ all this time.”

Brooke sighed. Note to self: send out memo telling all employees to change their passwords immediately. “Then this could’ve been anyone.”

“Essentially, yes,” Keith said. “I’ve been working with the folks at Citibank, and they provided me with a list of the date and times that Ian’s entries were altered, as well as the IP address for the computer from which the changes had been made. Based on a Google IP search, I’ve been able to determine that the a*shole in question did this from a computer in the Chicago area.”

“That covers about eighty percent of all Sterling employees and ex-employees.”

“Unfortunately, yes. And since that’s the extent of what I can do, I contacted the FBI.” Keith rolled his eyes in frustration. “The agent I spoke to said that because there was no actual loss of funds, and because this guy didn’t technically hack into the bank’s system—he used the default password and someone else’s username—the matter would be viewed as ‘low priority.’ When I pressed him on how low of a priority, he said he’d have to get back to me. Frankly, I’d be surprised if I ever hear from him again.”

And if that were the case, the jerk who’d done this would get away scot-free, still employed by Sterling. Luckily, however, Brooke knew someone who had the means to make sure that didn’t happen.

Someone who just so happened to owe her a favor.

“Thank you, Keith,” she said. “I can take things from here.”


* * *


A FEW MINUTES later, she knocked on the door to Ian’s office.

“Got a second?” she asked when he looked up from his desk.

Ian waved her inside. “Sure. Come on in.” When Brooke shut the door behind her, he studied her serious expression. “Oh, shit. Don’t tell me we’ve got another murderer.”

Brooke smiled slightly at the joke. At least now they could laugh about that. But this new situation . . . not so much. She took a seat in front of his desk and came right out with it. “Someone broke into the Citibank purchasing card database and altered a few of your entries. Specifically, they changed the descriptions for the expenses you incurred during your last trip to L.A.”

Ian looked at her in confusion. “The descriptions? Why would anyone do that?”

“To be malicious. We don’t know yet if it’s a current or former employee. We have determined, however, that this person took advantage of the fact that Liz was still using the default password.” She slid the spreadsheet Keith had given her across Ian’s desk. “I thought you should see this.”

Ian took the document from her, clearly still not following, and began to skim. After a few moments, his mouth pulled tight. He finished reading, and then set the spreadsheet down. “‘Sperm-burper.’ I haven’t heard that one since high school.”

“We have the IP address of the person who did this, but Keith was only able to narrow the person’s location to Chicago. The FBI is calling this a ‘low-priority’ matter, but I have a contact who might be able to help us out.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve been called a few bad words, Brooke. Do what you can, but I’m not asking you to make a federal case out of this. Yes, pun intended.”

“It’s possibly a current employee who did this, Ian. I’m not comfortable having some person working for Sterling who’s malicious enough to hack into the CEO’s personal account just to write these kinds of things. Regardless of whether the FBI makes an arrest, I want whoever did this out of here.” Brooke paused, following his lead and making her tone lighter. “Besides, this is what you pay me the big bucks for, remember?”

Ian rubbed his jaw. “If I recall correctly, I pay you the big bucks because the last time you were up for a raise you gave me a sixteen-page report with charts and graphs of all the salaries for comparable GC positions.”

Well, yes. Although in her defense, Ian had cheekily asked her to “prove” what she was worth. So she’d done just that—charts and graphs included. “So you’re okay with my moving ahead with this?”

“You have my blessing to track this prick down, if you can, and give him the full Brooke Parker treatment.”

That settled, she got up and headed for the door. Just as she was walking out of the office, Ian spoke.

“One last thing, Brooke.” He held her gaze and nodded in appreciation. “Thank you.”