She also realized her cell phone was ringing.
“Why aren’t you answering your phone? You don’t pay me enough to hunt you down, Barrett.”
She cut off Buck’s whining. “My reports are ready? Give me the highlights.”
“SFI of the Bahamas—your girl Tamara filed the State Department waiver as the principal of the foreign corporation.
Wren Cantu is listed as secretary/treasurer. Too early for tax returns of course. But I found a dozen bank accounts in Nassau with that corporate identification number.”
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“Couldn’t all of this have been done by anyone with brains and WiFi?”
“Some of the declarations are notarized.”
Kip rolled her eyes. How many notary stamps had she examined in the last few years that had proven to be courtesy of Photoshop? “Did you get copies?”
“I have several of them. These are just forms. If a determined person had the basic biographic information—social security number, et cetera, it would be easy to do it without her.”
Kip’s mind was running at hyperspeed. Maybe she wasn’t falling for a thief and in the process shredding her own self-identity and sense of morality. Maybe this was a setup. Or was she just hoping that was so? See, she wailed inwardly, this is why investigators shouldn’t have attachments to their clients. Second-guessing the instincts and deductive abilities she’d trusted all her life was shattering her confidence.
“Was there anything unusual about Cantu?”
“Not really. She owes a bunch of people money—or rather, Wren Cantu Incorporated owes a lot of people money. But it’s not bad, I mean, she makes a mint, too.”
She focused on what she could control. “I’ll be at your place in forty minutes or less. Add to the report a call list for these phone numbers.” She rattled off Tam’s private line and cell phone.
“That would be illegal. Where’s the warrant? What happened to the Girl Scout? You know, trustworthy, loyal—”
“That’s the Boy Scouts, and if you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a boy.”A lightning-fast shower was followed by a scramble into a pinstriped pantsuit, leaving her no time to dwell on her impetuous decision to kiss Tamara last night. It hadn’t felt impetuous, though.
Part of her had been very deliberate about it. That fact made other parts of her anxious, and still other parts really angry.
She scraped her wet hair back into a severe ponytail, grabbed up a light jacket at the last minute and pulled up in front of Buck’s in slightly over the forty minutes she’d allotted. He pushed an envelope out through the smallest possible opening in the door.
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It was accompanied by the aroma of strawberry Pop Tarts. Her stomach growled.
Kip flipped through the pages at stoplights. Like most of the other evidence, a third party could have filled out and signed the original documents, but they could have also been executed by Tam herself, with Cantu’s help. Tamara had never called the Bahamas from her private line, but she had called one number there numerous times in the last twenty days from her cell phone.
This puzzled Kip because Tamara knew better than anybody that cellular phones weren’t secure. She knew it was possible for a sophisticated electronics wizard to listen in or even use the phone line for their own purposes. Someone else could have placed these calls. They did conveniently begin just after Tamara’s last phone bill was posted by the carrier so Tamara would have only seen them if she’d made an extra effort to look at her usage since then.
Someone else could have set up SFI Bahamas. Tam’s sarcastic comment last night was the truth: a corporation in the Bahamas practically screamed “Look at me!” at law enforcement. That and the phone calls were a pattern of sloppiness. Tamara was so much smarter than this.
Unless...unless Tamara was behind all of it and was setting it up to make it look like someone else was doing the embezzling.
Perhaps she had it in mind that she would keep the embezzled money and the company by collecting insurance. What a lot of great publicity, too, a company and CEO so honest that someone went to these unbelievable lengths to discredit it. It could all be a brilliant, warped scheme.
Given that there were so many unsavory possibilities, she didn’t know how any part of her could think kissing Tamara was appropriate. Yet she had done just that, last night, because part of her had concluded a kiss was the only appropriate thing to do.
The bank accounts owned by the Bahamas corporation were listed. She would send Buck a fruit basket or something. She was willing to bet that these accounts had received at least some of the unauthorized transfers. She could confirm that by comparing 123
the international routing codes, and that provided one more bit of information that bolstered a prima facie case against Tam. On the face of it, she looked guilty—up-to-the-elbows-and-more kind of guilty. But it was all circumstantial.
A loud honk brought her back to the now green light. Reading in traffic was stupid, she acknowledged. She quickly veered to the unoccupied curb and was startled to hear the squeal of brakes.
She glanced in her rearview mirror as a dark blue sedan swerved to the curb behind her, then back into traffic, gunning its motor to speed past her.
She caught sight of the license plate long enough to recognize the U.S. Gov exempt markings.
Her heart pounding, she finished the drive to the office in a panic. It seemed as if every car was a dark blue sedan, behind her, in front of her, passing her, just turning so she couldn’t see the plate. Nobody followed her closely when she swiped her card to open the garage gate, but if she was being tailed by the Feds, they wouldn’t need to follow her into the garage. Her destination was clearly her workplace. She parked in her usual row, recognizing the few people on their way to the elevators as well. At least no one appeared to be lying in wait for her.
Her imagination was getting the best of her, she told herself.
She continued to repeat that until, at street level, the elevator stopped and two men got on. Blue suits, white shirts, red ties and Florsheims. Maybe on TV the FBI agents wore designer jackets and snug body tees, but not the ones who worked in Seattle.
They’d pushed the elevator button for SFI’s main reception on the fourth floor. Don’t panic, she told herself. Federal agents weren’t infrequent visitors. After all, any one of their investigators in the building could have business with law enforcement.
They exited the elevator and went directly to the desk. A few more people exited, some entered. When the elevator’s doors started to close, Kip feigned confusion and pushed the button to open the doors again. It was long enough to hear one of the agents—in that “We’re the FBI and we don’t have to be discreet”
voice they needlessly used—ask for Tamara Sterling.
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Heart throbbing in her throat, she pressed the button to close the doors. It seemed to take forever to resume the upward journey.
Someone had already pushed the button for the executive offices on eight. She rode past her own floor, not sure what she was doing, aware that her palms were sweating. She had no plan, only instinct, and it felt very scarily like the same instinct that had said, in spite of every rule to the contrary, that it was safe to kiss her boss’s boss’s boss.
The executive floor receptionist waved her on when she said Mercedes Houston was expecting her.
The agents could be right behind her. Tam didn’t need her protection, but Kip’s vision was edged with a dread black. The agents would take the evidence she had in her briefcase and she wouldn’t be able to help clear Tam, which was what her stupid heart wanted her to do.