Page 82 of Velvet Vaughn

“So should you.” He crossed the kitchen and lowered himself onto the stool across from her, wincing when the movement pulled at the stitches. “What did you find?”

“It can wait until you’ve had coffee.”

“Anja.”

She turned the laptop so he could see it. “I pulled financial records on Marcy. I wasn’t expecting to find anything.” She tapped the trackpad, and a spreadsheet of transaction dates filled the screen.

A cold unease moved through him. “You went through Marcy’s finances?”

She didn’t flinch from his stare. “There’s an account registered in the Caymans under a false name. There was no sophistication to it, so it wasn’t difficult to find.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Eleven deposits over the last fourteen months. Twenty to thirty thousand each, divided into smaller transfers and routed through different originating accounts to avoid drawing attention.” She let that sit for a second. “Unless you’re extraordinarily generous with your bonuses, Leo, this looks like someone being extremely careful to hide money.”

He pushed a hand through his hair, wincing again when the motion tugged at his arm. “Marcy’s been my assistant for six years. She remembers my clients’ kids’ birthdays.”

“I know.”

“She’s not selling me out to whoever’s doing this.”

“I didn’t say she was. But there is an offshore account with a quarter-million dollars in it that she’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep invisible. I don’t get to ignore that because I like her.” Anja closed the laptop halfway, as if she needed the screen out of the conversation for a second. “That doesn’t change what the numbers say.”

Leo sat with it, turning the timeline over. “Fourteen months ago.” He looked up. “That’s before Vic.”

“I noticed that too.”

“Whatever this is started before she had any reason to be involved in what’s happening now.”

“She might be involved in something else entirely. Or this only looks unrelated because we don’t know what it is yet.” Anja rubbed a thumb along the edge of a coffee mug without lifting it. “I want to be wrong about this. I’m hoping there’s some boring explanation that has nothing to do with you or Pinnacle or any of it.”

“But you don’t think there is.”

“I think we won’t know until we ask her, and that conversation will feel like an accusation no matter how delicate we are about it.” She met his gaze, and the exhaustion under her eyes had nothing to do with the last twelve hours. “I didn’t want to tell you before you’d even had coffee.”

Leo exhaled slowly, the ache in his arm suddenly the least of it. “When do we confront her?”

“We wait until she leaves work.”

“And if it’s not nothing?”

She didn’t answer that. She didn’t have to.