Chapter 103

Hailey glanced to her right where her guy was reclined in the passenger seat of the Mercedes coupe. The pair had made love on the couch, perused the West Coast financial data and then adjourned to the bedroom for a repeat of their earlier activities. It was well after three in the morning when they finally drifted off. Phil had to be awake at six to go over his prospectus for the day. Hailey had told him that she would help him but it was obvious Phil was nervous.

She had done her best to rectify his discomfort by giving him a blowjob just before they left the house. Now he was dozing in the seat beside her as she fought rush-hour traffic on the way to the office. She took a hand off the steering wheel and covered his with hers. Phil didn’t stir but just turned his hand over and intertwined his fingers with hers.

“I love you,” she said in a soft voice. Phil tightened his hand around hers but didn’t speak. “You’re going to be fine today. Bonnie and I will be there to help you out. Beth wouldn’t have put you in this position if you couldn’t do it.”

“I guess,” Phil replied, speaking for the first time since he’d called out his girlfriend’s name as he ejaculated a quarter hour earlier. Hailey had tucked his little soldier away, zipped him up and ushered him out of the house before the glaze had left his eyes.

“Your first appointment is with Rob Costello,” Hailey pointed out. “He’s got some new software and Beth wants your opinion on its functionality.”

Hailey was Beth’s executive assistant – and thus Phil’s executive assistant for the week. She knew his schedule inside and out (just as he knew her body inside and out, she mused with an inward smile).

“We’ll go over the West Coast figures again at 10 o’clock,” she continued. “If you’re right about what you suspect, you’ll have to call your mom in on this one. I’ll pull the financials for the past nine months while you’re meeting with Rob. I’m going to clear your schedule until after lunch. By then we’ll know whether we need to bother Beth immediately or whether it can wait until she gets back.”

Phil sat up and shook his head as he adjusted the seat.

“I’m going to call her either way,” Phil said. “She’s going to be out there. If someone is skimming from the discretionary fund, she can deal with it while she’s out there instead of making a separate trip.”

“I sort of thought she might want us to make the trip out there,” Hailey said. “I mean, you’re the one who spotted the anomaly. I’ve looked at that report a hundred times and I know Beth has gone over it a thousand times. I still don’t know how you spotted it so quickly.”

“The bottom line,” Phil admitted. “That’s what I look at first: How much money we’re making from each property. I remember when we first got Travel Corp. Mom thought it would bring in between half and three-quarters of a million a year. I hadn’t heard anything different in the past few months. That doesn’t translate to a $26,000 month. When I tracked the other numbers, the only thing that didn’t have a dedicated line item was ‘Discretionary Spending.’ I couldn’t see why they had such a large amount transferred to that section. That’s the only section where Mom doesn’t require detailed verification.”

“So someone is skimming,” Hailey said with a nod. “I’ll try to discreetly pull the files of anyone who has access to that account. Do you have any stroke with the West Coast banking industry? It would help if I could get a heads up on who has more money than they should.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Phil replied as they pulled into the apartment parking lot. “Mom might have that sort of cred but I don’t. I’m flattered you’d think I’m that powerful, though.”

He grinned and winked at her.

“You were able to get all that stuff on Courtney Hollings,” she pointed out.

“Uh, yeah, illegally,” Phil reminded her. “And it cost me four kicks in the nuts for it, I seem to recall.”

“I think I’ve more than made it up to you,” Hailey offered. She took his hand as they crossed the street to the office. The security guard nodded to them as they pulled their hands apart and boarded the elevator.

Rob Costello was waiting with Bonita Nejara because Phil was running a few minutes behind schedule.

“Sorry, Rob,” Phil told him. “I was running a little late this morning. We’re house-sitting for my parents and I forgot how brutal traffic can be.”

“No worries,” Rob replied genially. “What we have to discuss won’t take too long.”

“I’ll give you whatever time you need,” Phil promised. “Come on in.”

Phil gestured Rob to take a seat in the small conference area of his mother’s office and pulled two coffee mugs off the rack and filled them up. He passed one to Rob and sat down opposite of him – careful not to sit in the chair his mother usually occupied.

“What do you have for us?” he asked. A thought hit his brain and he held up a hand. “Wait! Let me ask you something. Can you get me into one of the subsidiaries’ computer networks?”

“A company you own?” Rob asked, sitting forward in his chair.

“Yeah, it’s one of Barton’s companies,” Phil said with a nod.

“Why don’t you call legal and make sure you’re cleared,” Rob suggested. “If they clear it, I can have you inside in 10 minutes.”

Phil nodded absently and picked up the phone. He called down to corporate legal and spoke to them for a few minutes. Rob had excused himself and rejoined Bonnie out front. Phil buzzed him back in.

“Do you have time to hold our meeting at lunch?” he asked. “I’d prefer you handle this other project first. You can invite your wife and I’ll treat you to somewhere good.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Rob said. “I just called Beth last week to see if she wanted an update on some of the stuff we’d put together. I figured it would be a month or so. Instead she set me up for this morning and told me I’d be meeting with you. We’ve put together some good stuff at Waterford but nothing earth-shaking. We can reschedule for the first of next month if you want.”

“I’d still like to take you and Gloria to lunch or to dinner somewhere nice,” Phil said, smiling at the man he’d spent a month working beside a year earlier. “Hailey and I have nothing scheduled this week. We don’t need to talk about work but it would be good to see you both.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Rob told him. “I need to access my network and pull some software off my FTP site.”

“Gobbly-gook,” Phil replied with a laugh. “Do what you want. I’m going to get Hailey and pull her in. Do you need my password to download what you need?”

“Please, I’m the one who gave you your password,” Rob joked. “I’m sure you haven’t changed it since I set you up at Waterford.”

“I change my password every week,” Phil informed him. “Just like you told me I should.”

He jotted down the eight-digit number (“Firefly5” in numerical text) and headed into the office he normally shared with his lover.

“Got a few minutes?” he asked.

Hailey looked up from her computer when Phil entered and she nodded at his question.

“I’ve tracked five people who have unfettered access to that account,” Hailey told him. “I’m sure there are more but those are the ones who don’t have to answer to a supervisor.”

“Nice work,” Phil said sincerely. “You’re really good at your job. I should tell you more often how impressed I am with how quickly you pick up on things.”

Hailey beamed at the praise in spite of herself. She was thrilled that Phil had noticed her business acumen in the few weeks they’d worked together.

“I got Rob in there hacking into Travel Corp.’s records,” he continued. “You gave me the idea in the car.”

“Did you talk to legal?” she asked.

“I went straight to the top,” Phil replied as he put his hand on her shoulder. “The High Queen herself came down off the throne long enough to explain it to me – in a bunch of really small words, I might add. We’re clear.”

Hailey laughed and shook her head at Phil’s description of Deirdre “Don’t Call Me DeeDee” Coleman-Jennings. She was the corporation’s chief legal officer – and a right pain in the ass if you didn’t have the requisite degree after your name. She grudgingly tolerated Phil and Hailey but barely. Still, she was a great corporate attorney so Beth kept her around.

But Deirdre Coleman-Jennings also had aspirations that didn’t stop at working in the legal department. She had a juris doctorate but also a master’s in business administration. At only 35 years old, Deirdre expected to be considered for a leadership role in Barton when Elizabeth Barton-Warner decided to take a step backward. She knew Beth well enough that to know the woman didn’t plan to stay at the helm until her late 50s or early 60s.

She wasn’t happy to see Beth’s young son and his protégée move into leadership roles. She wouldn’t go so far as to put Barton in jeopardy but she wouldn’t be unhappy to see Philip Warner and his bimbo girlfriend fall flat on their faces during their short foray into corporate management.

Beth sat silently in the Emerald Cove hotel room she was sharing with her husband and stared at the report her son had sent her.

She was peeved that she had looked a dozen times at the things Phil had seen once. She had been troubled by the lack of profits from Travel Corp. but she hadn’t investigated. Her son had been in the city for two weeks and had uncovered the fact that someone was stealing from Barton Holdings.

“You’re juggling a thousand things,” David said when he saw the look of consternation on his wife’s face. “This is a tree that got lost in the forest. Phil is still trying to keep from running into branches. That’s all it is. Don’t let it bother you.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Beth rejoined. “If word got out, I’d have 30 more people with their hand in the till.”

“If you hadn’t been so intent on making sure everything would run smoothly for Phil and Hailey this summer you’d have noticed the discrepancies in a heartbeat,” David mentioned. “I didn’t want to say anything but you’ve returned to your micromanaging days. You’ve made it a point to oversee every facet of the company from building maintenance to selecting the division heads. I knew why you were doing it but it’s not really a fair test of his skills if you stack the deck.”

Beth let out a long breath.

“They could go anywhere and succeed,” she said with resignation. “Look at what he’s done in the last two years. He’s taken that one building and turned it into a viable property holding company. They were talking about taking some of their profits from K2G2W and investing in a new subdivision that’s been approved in Stony Ridge. They have a fleet of vehicles and they could take that company anywhere. I wanted to give him an introduction to the company and to make sure he wants to work there in a couple of years.”