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“Too late. Tara tucked her in.”

That got a tired smile out of him.

“Night, Al. Don’t stay up doing homework till three.”

“I won’t.”

Probably, anyway. But sometimes, there were more interesting things than sleep.

When the door clicked shut, Alli opened the laptop the rest of the way and looked at the little grid of dead-end companies glowing on the screen. For the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, she felt the excitement of a brand-new mystery. She could feel the pull she’d had before the breakup and the firing and the long gray months of being nobody.

A puzzle. She hadn’t looked for it, and it had basically landed right in her lap. But the idea of helping out Leigh was irresistible, and she wasn’t going to walk away. Technically, if it had been Leigh’s job, now it was Alli’s.

She started a new document, just a blank page with a blinking cursor, and began to write down what she knew.

I won’t let you down, Leigh.

In only a few days, Sam had learned that Alli Crenshaw wasn’t the shy, retiring type. She had opinions, although she wasn’t militant or annoying about them. She didn’t push him to think her way, but she definitely had a mind of her own.

He liked that about her, too. He couldn’t have worked with someone who simply rubberstamped his every idea and thought. He wasn’t his father, after all.

So when she set the morning folders on his desk and went straight to her own without a word, he looked up. Normally, she’d greet him and offer to get him coffee.

“Everything okay?”

“Of course.” She sat. She squared the edge of her legal pad against the edge of the desk. “No, actually.”

He waited for her to gather her thoughts. She appeared to be conflicted, her lips pressed together and her hands fidgety.

“I did something last night I probably shouldn’t have.” She turned in the chair to face him through the open door. “Those companies. The ones in the folder from Leigh’s desk. I looked them up.”

Sam started to laugh. She was going to be fine in this job. She had an eye for detail, and just enough of a suspicious nature to make it work.

“What’s funny?” she said, clearly wary of his mirth.

“I did too. Last night. Same thing.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “I didn’t like that she’d been keeping them in her desk. Leigh didn’t keep things without a reason. So you saw it, then. They’re iffy at best.”

And that was being generous. He’d made a mental note last night to do some digging.

“I’m suspicious,” she admitted. “But I kept coming back to one thing. Every one of those contracts was signed off by the department head. So somebody with authority approved them. I figured they had to have been checked out.”

“There’s a good chance that didn’t happen,” Sam said with a heavy sigh.

“Why not?”

Henry, that’s why not.

“Because the department head is Henry. He’s the head of Facilities and Maintenance. He’s had his signature on the building’s spending for as long as I can remember, and I would not call him detail-oriented. I’m not sure I’d call him competent.”

Henry wasn’t even a good person to make up for his incompetence.

“You’re telling me he’d just sign purchase orders without reading them?”

She sounded like she didn’t believe him. He couldn’t blame her there.

“Henry has been working here without reading things for thirty years.”

“Then how on earth does he have a job?”