He wasn’t giving up Reid Enterprises entirely, at least. And he wasn’t going to have to worry anymore about Nicholas. The CEO of Sunrise Applications hadn’t managed to escape the long arm of the law a second time, and his trial was set for the end of January. Until then, he was out on bail, free to continue running his company, but his reputation had taken a hard turn for the worst, and most people didn’t want much to do with either of them. Which was just fine with Alex. It meant that Nicholas didn’t have enough power to threaten him. Even with his reduced presence at the office, Reid Enterprises would be safe. It was a good company. Well set up. He had confidence that it would be fine even if he wasn’t there to oversee almost every minute of every day.
Still feeling the pleasant lightness that came with knowing that he would be going home to a happy wife after a shorter workday than the ones he was used to, Alex pulled up the financial files he’d marked to go over last week when one of the accountants had brought them to his attention. Probably nothing much, he’d said, just a discrepancy in the numbers that might be the result of some kind of miscalculation, but it would be better if Alex checked it out. The financial records were tedious, but if there was something going on with them, Alex wanted to know.
He scrolled down the first report, pausing every so often to double-check the numbers. A
nd then he stopped. There, he could see, was the discrepancy that the accountant had pointed out. It wasn’t something that was that obvious, unless you were someone who worked with numbers on a daily basis. Just a small amount off from what Alex thought it should be. He checked the numbers.
Yes. It was off. Jaw tightening, Alex opened a new file and marked down the problem, then continued on.
There was another anomaly. And then, a few documents later, another.
They weren’t like the obvious charges that had started showing up on the company account when Gina had been a pawn for Nicholas’s tricks. These were slight fluctuations in the monthly investment numbers. Fluctuations that shouldn’t have been there. And every time, they affected the numbers for a different company, which should have made it less suspicious, but now that he’d seen the pattern Alex couldn’t believe it was anything but purposeful.
He called down to the accountant who’d had the papers sent up, and asked him what had made him notice the change in the numbers, because it wasn’t large enough that it would have immediately stood out as a red flag unless you were already looking for it.
“Well,” the accountant said, his voice nervous. “That’s actually the thing… I didn’t notice it on my own. One of the people from IT said to me that he’d noticed one of the employees opening files that didn’t seem to have any connection to business going on at the time. So he looked into it, and told me to check the numbers on the financials, to see if the trail led where he thought it did.”
“And it did,” Alex said. “Which is why you brought it to me.”
“Exactly, Mr. Reid. I just figured if something is going wrong, you’d want to know about it sooner rather than later.”
“Do you know which employee was pulling the files?”
“No. But I can tell you that the IT guy who brought it to me was Lebowitz.”
“I’ll give him a call, then,” Alex said. “Thank you, Mr. Martin. You’ve been helpful.”
He closed the call on the accountant, and called down to Mr. Lebowitz’s desk. The call was answered immediately.
“Hello, Mr. Reid. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve heard that you were involved in pointing out a potential issue to one of the accountants,” Alex said.
“Oh. Yeah. I was. There were some docs going through and getting pulled that I thought were a little strange, so I figured it was a good idea to say something to someone.” Mr. Lebowitz talked almost too quickly. Like he was rushing through what he had to say so that he wouldn’t get stopped. But Alex thought he remembered having met the man before and he had been equally in a rush, so it probably wasn’t a sign of suspicious activity.
“I appreciate it. Even if there’s nothing going on, it’s better to look deeper into something and be wrong than to not look at it at all.” Alex paused, and then continued. “Can you tell me which employee was requisitioning the files?”
“Well,” the nervous voice said, “I only know because of the employee number associated with the emails. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Reid, it was Zander.”
Alex rocked back in his chair. Surely that was wrong. He’d just handed over a large part of the running of his company to Zander. He trusted him completely. There was no way that his right-hand man was skimming money from him.
He realized that he hadn’t replied.
“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Lebowitz. I’ll look into it.”
The other man said something that Alex didn’t hear, and he hung up the phone, setting it back on the desk a little too hard. Why did things like this always insist on happening to him? Just when he was getting close to finally having worked out a balance between work and family, another problem had to come along and get in the way. And Zander? Alex shook his head. It couldn’t be Zander. Or if it was, there was some kind of misunderstanding, and everything had been done legitimately. Alex couldn’t believe otherwise.
But hadn’t the woman who’d been with him since he’d started building his company betrayed him for Nicholas?
Nicholas couldn’t be involved in it this time, but Alex realized that he couldn’t be so trusting that he would just pretend that nothing had happened when something obviously had. Sighing, he reached for the button that would connect him to the secretary’s desk.
“Please send Zander in to me,” he ordered. “As soon as possible.”
He sat back in his chair, and waited.
THE END