Chapter 13

She didn't have to worry about Cindy and Danny on Saturday. They had decided to go garage saleing, and were gone when Chad got there. She had stretched and was ready anyway. They ran twenty miles. It was wonderful, but they decided to take the next day off. Chad said he needed to work on lesson plans and Claire was thinking about going "home" to see how that felt.

She did go to the house on Sunday. It was quiet. Too quiet in fact. She thought that was odd, since John had never made a lot of noise anyway.

When she entered the bedroom, she found that John had gone out and bought some black paint. The words "Slut","Bitch", and "Whore" were scrawled in brush strokes three feet high all over the walls.

She decided to stay with Cindy a few more days.

And she took more pictures to give to Angela.

Work the next day produced more excitement. After going through eight files and finding only one real inconsistency, she ran into another where the formulas that totaled what the client was supposed to pay Martin had been manually altered. And they were altered to Martin's deficit, again. She put that one aside and pick up another one. It was the same way. So was the next one she pulled. Her draft total for what Martin had lost when all three files were added up was more than five million dollars.

She took the files to Quentin, who told her to sit down while he looked at what she'd discovered.

"I haven't gone into them deep," she said. "I just saw that the formulas had been altered and did a quick spreadsheet to see what the figures should have been."

"I understand," he said. "If you're right, though, then this was no accident. Once could be an accident. Four times? That stretches the limits of my credulity."

"What does it mean?" asked Claire. She was an accountant, not a detective.

"Did you notice that two of these involve the same client and that they're all corporations, rather than the government?" asked Halloran.

"I didn't think of that, but now that you mention it ... yes."

"Who benefitted by this?" he asked, still examining the open file on his desk.

"The clients," she said. "They saved millions."

"And if that was by design? Who else might have benefitted?"

Claire swallowed. You didn't have to be a detective to know the answer to that.

"Rick," she said.

"You know we found drugs in his locker when he was terminated."

"I heard something about that, but I heard it was in his desk," said Claire, trying not to sound like a snoop.

"What was in his desk was pocket change compared to what was stashed in his locker. They were not in prescription form," said Quentin.

"I don't understand."

"They were bought from someplace other than a pharmacy."

"Oh."

"In other words, he bought them on the street. Do you know how much Oxycontin sells for on the street?" asked Quentin.

"No," Claire responded.

"It can go for as much as fifty dollars a pill."

"That seems like a lot," said Claire.

"There were fifteen pills in his desk drawer. We found over three hundred pills in the bottom of his locker, inside a gym bag."

"Wow," gasped Claire. She was an accountant. Her mind instantly supplied a figure of at least $15,750 as it could apply to that quantity.

"That kind of quantity called for the DEA to become involved, so it's not being investigated by the local police. Mr. Zimmerman asked that we be kept in the loop, in case Sanders was dealing. If he was, then we could have real problems inside the company. But so far there is no evidence that was the case."

"That's good, right?"

"Yes and no," said Quentin. "Yes, in terms that we don't want addicts working in the company. No in terms that, if he wasn't dealing, that meant he bought these for himself. And that means he spent a whale of a lot of money on his habit."

"Seventeen thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars, at a minimum," said Claire.

"Who knows?" said Quentin. "It could have been less, I suppose. Maybe drug dealers give a discount for bulk quantities. But it wasn't cheap. Those pills represented roughly fifteen percent of his annual salary, though, almost two months pay. That's a lot of money when you have bills to pay every month. And now, I have a feeling I know where he got that money."

"Kickbacks?"

"Yes. How many more files do you have to go through?"

"Dozens."

"Hold off for now. If this turns out to be what I think it is, there's going to be a shit storm. Important, rich people could end up in jail and the value of company stocks will plummet. Martin will seek millions, maybe even billions in damages. It will end up on the nightly news. And that's with only the four files you already found. I want to run the four you've found up the flag pole. Mr. Zimmerman is probably going to want an independent investigation into this. That means the FBI. He's not going to be happy. DSS is in our shorts all the time anyway, and now the DEA. If the FBI comes into things we may as well designate an office exclusively for the use of whatever federal investigative agency is camped out in the building at any given time."

"What should I do with the rest of the files?"

"Sit on them. Keep them in your office. The FBI will want to seize them as evidence. The only person who knows you have them is Marcie, right?"

"No. She brought me the initial set, but I've been pulling them from archives myself since then."

"You fill out requests for them, right?"

"Of course."

"I'll get those and keep them in my desk so nobody will know you've checked them out. How many more of his files are in archives?"

"I have no idea," said Claire.

"I'm going to have security keep a special eye on the archives, then."

"Why?"

"Because if you negotiate twenty or thirty percent of what you save a company as your cut, then Rick Sanders has the kind of money to hire someone to steal those files. Or destroy them."

"I never thought of that."

"Good. That means you don't think like a criminal."

"You do," she said. It just came out. She hadn't meant to say it. But she was so shocked by all this that her mental guard was down.

He grinned, and it looked feral to Claire.

"I'm paid to," he said.

The other thing that made that day memorable was that John was bound over for trial in circuit court. She learned this in a phone call from the district attorney, Julie Torrez.

"Okay," said Claire, once this information had been imparted. "What does that mean?"

Julie had answered this question before, and she launched into her canned speech.

"Basically, it means that my part in this is finished. I took him to district court where there was an arraignment and pre trial examination of the evidence by the judge. He found there was probable cause to believe that John had committed the offense of conspiracy to commit first degree murder. That's a federal offense, so he was bound over to the U.S. circuit court, where a special assistant United States Attorney will take over prosecution of the offense."

"Does that mean he's going to jail?"

"Let me put it this way," said Julie. "It means he's going to trial, assuming the arraignment in circuit court goes well. I can't think of any reason there could be a problem. The evidence is solid and there's a lot of it. We have a cooperating witness who has accepted eight years in prison for his testimony, which lends his testimony credibility. And then, of course, there are you and Mr. Morgan. Your husband's attorney is already angling for a plea deal of some kind. Your husband isn't going to jail. He's going to the penitentiary for at least ten years and that's if he's lucky."

"Good," said Claire.

"Oh," said Torrez. "I almost forgot. They caught the third guy. His name is Ronald Helterbrand, and he was hiding in Texas. He tried to cut a deal too, but the deals were all used up. He and Edwin Petrike may very well be sent to the same prison as your husband. In cases like this I like to imagine that the subjects become cellmates."

It was a lot to process, and Claire spent the rest of the day doing that. It was good that she didn't have any work to do, because she wouldn't have gotten much done. She took off around three and went to the mall, where she got herself a new running suit for the cold weather she knew would soon be there. She also got a new pair of running shoes since her others were getting worn out. By the time she got to school classes were over. The office Chad used as coach was empty, so she went to the girls' locker room to get dressed for a run.

She had her shorts on and was getting ready to don her sports bra when a group of three girls came into the locker room, talking and making noise. They stopped when they saw her. She recognized them as some of the cheerleaders she'd seen on the field during practices. Claire was completely unembarrassed about being topless in front of them. They were girls, after all, and this was the girls' locker room. Nude bodies were common here.

"You're not supposed to be here," said one of them, and Claire instantly identified her as the leader of this little group.

"I won't be here long," said Claire, bending over to tie her new shoes.

"You're The Babe," said one of them.

Claire snorted. "It's a stupid name."

"Maybe not," said one of the other girls. The third elbowed her.

Claire thought about how these young women might be interpreting what they saw. Most teenage girls saw only others their age in the buff. Generally, at home, nudity was frowned on. That, she remembered. So girls their age didn't get to see grown women nude. Not outside a computer, anyway. Claire remembered what it was like to be that age, wondering if you were pretty, thinking other girls were prettier, knowing that older women had power over men. The older women's bodies were part of that power, and girls experimented with trying out that power on boys. Some girls, anyway. Cheerleaders often used their appearance and sexuality to tease boys. And men as well. But the normal, average girl didn't think she could compete with the lushness of maturity and experience. Even cheerleaders, at that age.

That's what they were probably looking at ... what they thought of as the lushness of maturity and experience. But they were wrong. Claire might be mature, but she wouldn't have classified herself as experienced. Especially since she couldn't remember ever having sex. Not with anything except imitation erections.

"Being a babe has nothing to do with your value as a woman," she said, shrugging into her sports bra. "Remember that. It's what's inside you that gives you value, not your looks."

"Easy for you to say," said a girl, but Claire couldn't tell which one.

"Do you sleep with Coach Morgan?" another girl asked, suddenly. Two others turned to stare at her and she shrugged.

"That's none of your business," said Claire. "Do you sleep with your boyfriend?"

"Sometimes," said the girl, her chin jutting forward.

"Then you're a fool," said Claire. "You cheapen your body when you give it away for popularity."

She pulled her top over her head and reached to bind up her pony tail. The girls looked at her thrusting breasts, under the spandex. She could see envy in one girl's eyes.

"He's not your first boyfriend, and he won't be your last," she went on. "You don't even know yourself yet, so how can he possibly know you? And when you do meet a man who really wants to find out who you are, and takes the time to do that, you will already have given away every precious part of yourself that you might wish to gift him with."

"Grown ups are so full of shit," sneered the leader.

"Then why are you trying so hard to act like one?" asked Claire. "If we're so lame, why do you constantly try to be like us?"

"You're not supposed to be in here," said the girl again, most likely because she couldn't answer the question.

"So call security," said Claire. She stood up. "I'm going to go run with Coach Morgan. That's what we do. We spend hours and hours running, and talking and being friends. And that's worth a hell of a lot more than a quick toss in the hay. You'll learn that some day, but at the rate you're going you'll go through a lot of pain and heartache before you do."

She left them there, wondering why she'd said anything to them at all. Her little speech rang false in her own ears. She liked the way Chad looked at her, teased her, pursued her. It made her feel desirable, something John had never done, at least in the few memories she had of him. She argued with herself as her feet took her to where she remembered Chad's classroom was. She craved what she and Chad did together, but she did want a toss in the hay. It just needed to be under the right circumstances. And as much of a horn dog as Chad was around her, she knew that, down deep, he respected her. If all he was after was sex, he'd have brushed her off long ago. She knew he was frustrated. She was too. But they were frustrated for different reasons. He knew what he wanted from her and was frustrated because she'd given him signs that it might be possible, but hadn't delivered yet. She was frustrated because her life was too complicated, and there seemed to be no way to make things more straightforward.