Sophie’s safety was worth it.
“That’s a lot of energy and money to throw around if they have nothing to hide.” Forte was actually cheering up thinking about it. It was probably a sign of how bad a person he actually was because he was glad Ky was buried under attorney bullshit. It meant Sophie’s employers were guilty of something.
“There are quite a few clients who like to provide their records and expenses in amazingly awful condition. It’s a mess to dig through. And what do you know, but the worst files have neat little notes in the margins indicating where the numbers need to be reconciled. They’re accompanied by a certain friend’s initials.” Ky sighed. “She was too detail-oriented. It had to have taken her multiple nights of long hours to plow through all this. There are other files she must not have seen, though, or she would’ve seen the trend across the different shell companies and client names. We’re seeing a bigger picture than she had access to, now that we’re investigating.”
But Sophie wasn’t daunted by long hours or hard work. She dove into it, and once she got hooked on a particular task, she wouldn’t stop until it was complete to her satisfaction.
“Our friend has a passion for math.” Forte gave Sophie a gentle squeeze, then rubbed his hand up and down her upper arm. She responded by leaning her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “She comes up with weird applications for it.”
“Accounting is definitely math, and you definitely have to be a particular kind of personality to want to do it day in and day out.” Ky’s voice took on a wry tone. “It’s killing me just going through all these files. Just about half the files of interest are ones where she found issues and made notes to talk to the client to reconcile. It adds up. If she’d come up out of the nitty-gritty details and added it across the multiple files, or had access to the other documentation, it accumulates into significant amounts of money.”
Ah. “Let me guess. All the issues look like typos or errors in notation.”
Ky grunted. “There’s a lot of missing zeroes in some places and added zeroes in others. A couple of places where digits are switched.”
Sophie’s employer, or possibly the accounting firm as an entity, was hiding the ebb and flow of a lot of money. Sophie might not have encountered the real evidence of it, but she’d gotten too close with her detail-oriented knack for wanting to make sure everything reconciled to the last cent.
“Does her employer have a hobby of putting together car bombs in his garage?” Forte was half joking. It couldn’t be that easy.
“No evidence pointing to such a hobby.” Of course, Ky would’ve gone to the man’s home to check. “I was honestly thinking it’d be overzealous trying to have her eliminated. It would’ve been fine to just fire her.”
“But there was a bomb in her car before she was fired.” There were pieces scattered all over the place. Forte wanted to be able to put them together to make a whole picture, but he wasn’t seeing it yet.
He already had an idea of where to look, though.
“And it was her employer who told her to take the rest of the day.” Now the anger was starting to come through in Ky’s words. “He’s involved. This man is neck-deep in it, and he’s too panicked to lie well. I’ll get to the meat of this.”
“Any of those shell companies or clients connected to Labs-Anders Corporation?” Forte hadn’t shared earlier because Ky needed more to go on than a hunch.
“Not on first look.” Ky was silent for a moment. “But I’ll take a harder look.”
Good enough. Forte was betting Labs-Anders Corporation did more than recruit in the Philadelphia area. And it was no coincidence that Cruz had encountered them actively recruiting not too long ago. It made sense for them to have other business interests in the city.
“Anything we can do?” Forte was glad Ky was continuing. Others might stop at the surface reasons and decide they had enough of the truth to call it a day. Not Ky.
“Keep our friend hidden.” Ky was sober, sincere. “There’s no way the former employer had the knowledge or skills to be directly responsible for either the car bomb or breaking into her apartment.”
Forte did his best to keep his own tone light. “Is there evidence your man hired someone else to go after our friend? Is there any connection?”
Ky would look into Labs-Anders Corporation and understand why Forte was asking. And then the police officer would tie in the evidence he had, hopefully.