The door to the inner office was locked. I had it open in three slow heartbeats and went in. Filing cabinets, a desk, a personal computer, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computer was shut down. I slipped the little portable drive into a port and booted it up. “Drive is in.”
I heard the clicking of Viti’s keys through the earpiece. “They’re showing ID to the guard.”
“Maybe they’re orthodontists,” I said.
A soft snort came over the earpiece. “You only have a few moments.”
I went over to the filing cabinets. They were locked, too. There wouldn’t be time to go through all of them.
If I was an attractive, self-absorbed crooked tax attorney, where would I keep my most incriminating things?
There was a door at the back of the office, to a small bathroom.
It had a mirror.
I went to it, ran my claw tips around it, pried gently, and popped it off its mount. There was a hollow space behind it in the wall, roughly formed. A brown legal folder rested inside.
“I’m in,” Viti said. “So are they. They’re getting in the elevator now.” Keys clicked. “Oh, she’s rather obvious as well. Copying files to the thumb drive.”
I took the folder, slid it into my shoulder bag, and carefully replaced the mirror. Then I went back to the computer and grasped the thumb drive. “Ready to go when you are.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Viti reported. “Ten. Five. Now, Grey.”
I popped out the thumb drive, shut down the computer, and paced back the way I’d come.
I got to the stairwell and slid into it just as the elevator doors opened, wafting out the scent of ghoul, an acrid odor with a faint reek of decaying flesh, buried under too much cologne. I shut the door silently and froze as the ghouls passed me and went into the office of Acumen, Inc.
Then I went back out the way I came.
“So,” Viti said. “The ghouls have Ms.Montecrist under surveillance.”
We were back at the office. I produced the thumb drive, and she seized it like a raven with a peanut. Then I took out the legalfolder from my shoulder bag. “Apparently,” I said. “But what is she doing that’s worth surveilling?”
Viti put the thumb drive into her laptop, sat down at her desk, and cracked her knuckles while her machine booted up. “Shall we find out?”
I started going through the contents of the folder. Viti took the thumb drive.
Ten minutes later I looked up to find my assistant looking back at me.
“What you got?” I asked.
“She’s Petty’s accountant,” Viti said. “He’s lost a great deal of money in bad investments in the last eight or nine months. Sixteen million.”
I held up several pages. “I have here records of sixteen million dollars in assets in an offshore account.”
Viti sat back slowly in her seat. “Embezzlement.”
“She’s taking Petty for everything he’s worth,” I confirmed. “Including a ten-thousand-dollar wire transfer taken out in cash the day before yesterday.”
“Sheryl Petty’s retainer,” Viti noted. “She is Sheryl’s accountant as well. Mrs.Petty has also lost a great deal of money in the markets.”
I went to the next section of the folder. “Uh-huh. Here it is. Cammy is scamming them both.”
“Hmm,” Viti said, her face thoughtful. “This behavior seems somewhat less than ethically ideal.”
“Correct,” I said.
She smiled faintly. Viti was not insecure about much, but she often had trouble grasping fundamental ethics.
