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  Caitlyn shrugged. “It would have to be an internal theft. That or somebody that works there had to help get it out. That lab is locked down more than any other place in town. But it looks like we might have two problems. Can you take a look at these files? Something is definitely out of line, and you have the best mind to figure out what.”

  “I’ll be glad to, but it may take a few minutes.”

  Caitlyn opened the office door. “Thanks. I’m going to the restroom to clean up. I’ll be back.”

  Chapter 8 (12:45 P.M.)

  Elly stood in front of one of the large windows in her office, staring at a mockingbird preening on a nearby tree branch. It seemed so happy and peaceful, and she envied it. How much would she have given to be on the other side of this window, free to do what she pleased?

  She grunted. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt free. She had the image of a perfect life: A successful husband, two beautiful daughters and a talented, athletic son, a nice home and a good career - but she was barely holding it together. Her husband worked long hours, and they fought more than they talked when he was at home. Recently, he had been staying with a friend that had an apartment in Columbia when he had to work late nights, which was once or twice a week. He claimed they had a big job with a tight deadline, but that never kept him from coming home before. She suspected the friend was a woman, but she couldn’t prove it. She tried to push the suspicion away by doting on her children and digging in her work.

  Her work was another problem. After two years on the job she was just as slow as she was when she first got it. Her husband helped her get the job because they desperately needed more income to make their house payments and keep the children in private school. He insisted that she work in Woodland and not look for a job in Columbia so she could be there for the kids. How heroic. It was a great job but she knew she was in over her head. Nobody knew she tried for Megan’s job so she could get out of this position except Mrs. Ross, who promptly threw a fit to have a CPA in that position. She tried to plead with Mr. Harris for one more favor, but he felt he had done enough for her. She ran out of favors, but at least he had some pity on her.

  Elly rubbed her eyes. She was grateful to Mr. Harris for hiring Mandy to help her out in May. He said he was friends with Mandy’s mother and knew she would be a great help to Elly. Elly was relieved at the way things improved. Before they hired Mandy, Caitlyn and Megan were in her office all the time. If Caitlyn wasn’t complaining about the system not allowing a payment because of improper authorizations, then Megan was fussing at her for using improper funding codes. Elly tried, but just couldn’t seem to keep all of those numbers, rules and exceptions to the rules straight. She would finally get one thing straight, and get confused on another. She sighed. They could both be such intellectual snobs, and Caitlyn seemed to have a special talent for making her feel stupid. Mandy put a buffer between her and them, so it had been easier the past few months. Still, she didn’t like those girls, and she found it increasingly difficult to remain civil despite Mrs. Ross’s frequent warnings to hold her tongue and “remain professional.”

  Elly dropped in her desk chair, staring blankly at the spreadsheets on her computer screen. This was all going to blow up soon, and she hoped she wouldn’t get burned too badly in the explosion. Her marriage was on the rocks, and she desperately needed it to maintain her lifestyle. She couldn’t support her current lifestyle without her husband’s salary, and she didn’t know how long she would last in her own job. One day, Mandy would grow tired of being an office runner. She would want a job where she had some authority of her own and would either move up or move on, especially with a connection as powerful as Mr. Harris. Elly shook her head, laughing sarcastically. She worked hard to keep her life looking perfect from the outside, but she was smart enough to know it would come to an end one day. She hoped she could keep her humiliation hidden from the world.

  Her musings were interrupted when Megan stormed into Elly’s office. She didn’t even knock; she just pushed open the door and dropped a stack of papers on her desk. “I’m locking down the federal account immediately.”

  “Why?”

  “These reports aren’t a disorganized mess, they’re falsified. Until I can get the auditors to sort out this mess, no money is being spent out of that fund,” Megan fumed. “Mrs. Ross is dead, leaving me as the only CPA in this office. Without her to explain what happened, I have to take responsibility for all of the Accounting functions in this office and I refuse to take the fall for whatever mess you guys have made.” She pounded her finger on the papers. “Everything comes through you first. You signed off on this!”

  Elly sprang out of her chair. “I will not be falsely accused! Everything I processed in here is true and accurate. I know you don’t think a lot of me, but I’m no thief!”

  “Hey!” Caitlyn shouted, running up the hall. “I heard you two all the way up the hall. What’s going on?”

  Megan blew out a long breath. “I’m sorry. I was just so mad when I saw this! These reports have been tampered with. I don’t know how or why, but between Mrs. Ross and this sorry wretch, we’re missing over a million dollars!”

  “I’ve had it with both of you,” Elly said. “I’m not stupid. I know neither of you like me, but I never thought your jealousy would drive you to accuse me of embezzling money.”

  “Elly, our jealousy is all in your mind,” Caitlyn said. “In fact, right now I’m glad I didn’t get your job. And why on earth would Megan be jealous of you? She’s your boss.”

  Elly stood up straighter and looked down her nose. “I have a successful husband, a family that loves me, a good home, and a great job.”

  “You little witch!” Megan shouted. “Everybody knows your husband bought this job for you! I’m always correcting your mistakes – mistakes you have no excuse to make after two years on the job!” She put her hands on her hips. “I know you tried to stop me from getting this job. I know you applied for it and Mr. Harris told you he couldn’t promote you because you aren’t a CPA. All of your years of sucking up couldn’t stand against my hard earned accomplishments!”

  Elly’s jaw dropped. “Your professional life is the only thing you have in order. I have a good life, one that everybody envies. At least I’m not pathetic and living with my parents like you do!”

  Megan crossed her arms. “Not perfect. You couldn’t get around me to have the perfect job to top off your perfect life. But at least I’m honest. I don’t buy favors and kiss up to powerful people to get what I want. I use my brain and work hard to earn it. You just don’t like me because I’m in your way, and all that crap you take from Mr. Harris can’t get you around me.”

  Elly’s fought to regain her composure. “People always attack those they’re jealous of.”

  “Ladies!” Caitlyn shouted, closing the office door. “We have bigger problems!” She turned to Elly. “It seems you’re in a bit of a pickle. We may not like you, but we aren’t sick enough to falsely accuse you. We just want to know what’s going on.”

  Elly leaned against her back wall. “I am being honest. I didn’t falsify those reports.”

  “Have you looked at them?”

  Elly picked them up and glanced over the paperwork, a puzzled look on her face. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out more papers. Caitlyn raised an eyebrow. “You keep copies of these? Mrs. Ross wants all the copies shredded after the paperwork is scanned in the system.”

  “I’m behind on cleaning out my files,” Elly turned her attention to the papers, pulling out a yellow highlighter and marking several items. After a few minutes, she turned the papers toward them.

  “It’s a good thing I make my own copies. You’re right. These reports have been falsified, but not by me.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how this happened, but numbers have been changed. As you can see from what I highlighted, it looks like these figures have been slightly altered, especially for large, expensive items, like computer and specimen analysis equipme
nt. Here’s another thing. It looks like Mrs. Ross canceled some payments that Caitlyn processed and reissued them to pay for backordered equipment. In fact, about half of the money missing is right there, paying for items we didn’t receive. It looks like we paid them again when it came in, since they invoiced us on a different invoice number when they actually delivered the items.”

  Caitlyn nodded. “That’s what caught my eye. When the vendors don’t deliver the entire order, they put a note on the invoice indicating a backorder, and how much they deducted from the total bill. Then they invoice us separately when it’s shipped. It looks like she reissued the checks to pay for the backorders, then paid again when they invoiced for the actual delivery.”

  Megan sighed. “Ok, I apologize for accusing you, Elly. In fact, I commend you for having the foresight to make copies this stuff. That’s a huge help. Otherwise, we would have had to contact the vendors, and that would have taken time. The question is; how was this done? Everything we process is an original.”

  “Or is it?” Caitlyn asked, rubbing her eyes. “This wouldn’t be difficult to do. With the right software, you could altar and reprint it. It would look like an original. I know Mrs. Ross has a color printer in her office.”

  Megan rubbed her head. “Elly, did you give these reports directly to Mrs. Ross?”

  “No, they go to the research lab first so they can verify that they received everything we’re invoiced for; then they go to Mrs. Ross. I have Mandy do that. I’m too busy to run my stuff all over the place, and Mrs. Ross would stop me for half an hour to tell trivial stories about her family that I could care less about. Mandy didn’t seem to mind, so I let her suffer through it.”

  “Did she take them directly to the hospital, or do they send somebody over to pick them up?” Caitlyn asked.

  Elly stared into space. “She does a mail run over there every day. The invoices come directly to us, and I put them together in an Expenditure Report that we keep for the grant. Once I get a copy for that, Mandy takes it over there to have them verify that everything is correct, attach their Verification of Receipt Report, and bring it to Mrs. Ross.”

  “Then she audits it, and gives it to me to key in the system for payment. I scan the file in the system and give the original to Mrs. Ross to hold until the actual check issued and mailed out from this office. She’s supposed to keep those in her office, in case a vendor calls.” Caitlyn mumbled. “Who mails out the checks?”

  “Mandy,” Elly said. “Mrs. Ross asked her to enclose the original invoice with the check so the vendor will know how to apply the payment.” She shook her head. “It seems the process is flawed from the start. I remember telling Mrs. Ross a few times that it didn’t make sense for me to do my report before the lab verified their shipments. If they said something was wrong, I had to redo the entire thing. She said such errors are rare and the Verification of Receipt Report is merely a formality that isn’t worth holding up my end of the work.”

  Caitlyn leaned back in her chair. “Ok, no offence but now I’m really glad I didn’t get your job.” She sighed and mimicked Megan’s head rub. “This is enough to give me a headache. I wonder what happened to the original invoices between Mandy and Mrs. Ross. Obviously, they were being tampered with somewhere between the two of them. The staff at the lab wouldn’t do a report for something that was incorrect. Do you think somebody at the hospital was trying to swindle us out of money, or do you think Mrs. Ross was tampering with them without Mandy knowing?”

  Elly sighed. “I don’t know what to make of any of this. I want to believe Mandy is innocent. She’s so sweet and helpful. She even helped me work out some problems I had on these reports. I’ll have her look over them if I’ve have problems balancing something. She’s a Godsend to me with her Accounting degree and eye for detail.”

  “She knows how to do these reports?” Megan asked.

  Elly nodded. “Sometimes if things aren’t balancing right, she helps me go through the grant records to double check my calculations. I thought it would be nice to have her trained as backup.”

  The three of them sat silently for a moment. Finally, Caitlyn broke the silence. “I don’t want to accuse anybody either, but it looks awfully incriminating for her. The original invoices are gone – probably mailed back to the vendors with the checks, because if they received a falsified invoice as backup they would have called us. So Elly’s copies are all we have to go from. The question is, wouldn’t the vendors say something if we overpaid them so much? I’ve had them contact me periodically in the past about issuing refund checks for overpayments.” She wrinkled her brow. “Of course, I haven’t had any calls like that in a while. Who does deposits?”

  “Mandy,” Elly said. “All of our deposit records are accurate, though. See?” she said, pulling another folder out of her drawer, “I compare these with my copies when Mandy brings the receipts back from the bank. On my end, everything lines up. But we don’t attach deposit records to the federal paperwork. They’d only look through the deposit records if we were audited.”

  “We are supposed to be audited,” Megan said. “They were supposed to come in this week, but since Mrs. Ross was in the hospital, they postponed their start date until November 1st.”

  Elly raised her eyebrows. “Why wasn’t I informed of this?”

  “I knew they were coming,” Caitlyn said. “It’s standard procedure when you have a federal grant. They usually send people in every two years to audit your records for verification that everything is balanced and to determine if the amount of money you’re getting needs to be adjusted. I thought Mrs. Ross told you.”

  Elly scowled. “She didn’t.”

  “Well, it looks like we have another problem on top of the quarantine,” Megan said. “We’ve got nothing but time, so let’s talk to Mandy. It seems she has a hand in every part of the process. Perhaps she can shed some light on this.”

  “Where is Mandy?” Caitlyn asked. “I’m surprised she didn’t come running when you two were yelling at each other earlier.”

  They looked at one another blankly.

  “She has to be here somewhere,” Megan said. “The building isn’t that big. Let’s try to find her. Maybe she’s chitchatting with that cop in the lobby. It’s on the other side of the building.”

  “I’m going to contact the banks and see if anybody opened another account for the hospital,” Caitlyn said. “If the vendors were refunding overpayments, they would have made the checks out to the hospital. Since we aren’t putting them in our regular account, somebody may have opened another one just for this money.”

  Elly put her hands on her hips. “How do you plan to contact the banks when our phones, computers, and FAX machine are shut down?”

  Caitlyn pulled her phone out of her sweater pocket. “They can’t shut this down.”

  Elly raised an eyebrow. “I knew it! Where did you hide it this morning?”

  Caitlyn put it back in her pocket. “I left it in my desk drawer last night. Since you didn’t let me stop by my office when I got in, I didn’t have it with me when they checked us.” She stood. “I’m making another trip through the ceiling. I want to go to Human Resources. It’s on the corner opposite of the lobby, so Officer Richards shouldn’t hear me from there.”

  “Good idea,” Megan said. “We’ll find Mandy and see if she can help us put this puzzle together.”

  “And perhaps have a discussion about having respect for your colleagues,” Elly spat out as Caitlyn stood on top of a file cabinet to push a roof tile aside.

  “One problem at a time,” Caitlyn said. “Right now, let’s focus on the task at hand. God knows, if we can get the cops to arrest someone on embezzling charges, maybe they’ll be distracted long enough for the rest of us to make a run for it.”

  Megan stretched a thin smile. “Now that’s creative problem solving.”

  Chapter 9 ( 1:15 P.M.)

  Caitlyn headed to Lana Brown’s office, on the other end of the building. Lana was the head
of Human Resources, and had the largest office in the building. Lana gained this privilege more from necessity than from rank, since she had to keep hard copies of personnel files for every hospital employee. They weren’t allowed to digitize those files, so the office was lined with lateral file cabinets. Lana was paranoid about keeping the data secure, so she always kept her door closed and locked, even if she was running to the restroom for a few minutes.

  Caitlyn settled in behind Lana’s large wooden desk to make her calls. She wasn’t concerned about being heard because the office was in the back corner of the building, but she knew she couldn’t be gone too long without rousing suspicion.

  She called all three banks in town with no luck. The only account open was the legitimate one they had been making all of their transactions through for the past thirty years. She sighed as she went through her cover story with the last bank she called.

  “No ma’am, we aren’t interested in opening an account. As I said, there’s some confusion with the federal money for our research lab, and we think they accidentally wired money to the wrong bank. We’re trying to track it down.”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t help,” the lady on the other end said. “We certainly would have followed up on it if we received it.”

  “I know you would have. I just had to double check to make sure we covered all of our bases.”

  “I understand,” the lady said.

  “Thanks so much for your help …”

  “You know,” the lady broke in, “we got a call from a bank in Columbia about a month ago. They got a wire transfer that looked like it belonged to the hospital. It was from the federal government. Apparently, you got an increase to your grant, and they tried to transfer it to you.” She paused a moment. “It was a large amount of money – around $1.5 million. They called to see if we held your accounts, and we directed them to your regular bank.”

  “Do you remember what bank it was?”