Page 22 of The Money Man
Derek picked up a bottle of designer water from a tray and set it in front of her. Then he unknotted his yellow paisley tie and yanked it out of his collar with a zing of silk against cotton. When he flicked open the top two buttons of his shirt and exposed the muscled column of his neck, a flicker of awareness ran through Alice.
“Ahh, much better,” he said. “It’s been a long day of back-to-back meetings.”
When he settled into the chair next to hers, she could swear she felt his body warm the air around her. “Now let’s see the culprit.”
Alice pulled out copies of the transaction logs, bank statement, and the offending receipt and passed them to Derek and Leland. “The first one is the credit card summary from the end-of-the-month report produced by BalanceTrakR. After deducting the bank fees, it matches the bank statement, as you can see.”
Derek nodded, his attention focused on the paper.
“Next is a report of all the credit card receipts for the month, which I printed out after I noticed the discrepancy. Flip to page five and take a look at the highlighted number. Now take a look at the daily log sheet. That was printed out the day the charges were made at the salon. Just by good luck, the owner, Natalie Hart, kept all the daily logs. Check out the highlighted number.” She flipped to the last page of the packet. “And now, take a look at the copy of the actual credit card receipt with the customer’s signature.”
Derek whistled and Leland pursed his lips. For about a minute, the only sound in the room was the rustle of papers being flipped back and forth. Alice could practically feel the crackling energy being generated by two brilliant minds working out the implications of her discovery.
Then the men exchanged a long look across the table.
“What does that look mean?” Alice asked, unable to read the silent communication.
“This isn’t a bug.” Leland’s tone was harsh, his accent almost undetectable.
Derek nodded again.
“Not a bug? But the end-of-the-month report is wrong. You can see it right here.” She jabbed at the papers with her finger. There was no way this wasn’t a software issue.
“He means it’s deliberate,” Derek said.
“Deliberate?” Alice was bewildered. “Why would anyone deliberately throw the total off by $3.37?”
“They’re siphoning off the money into another account, probably offshore,” Derek said, his expression grim. “They’re stealing from all their clients.”
Chapter 7
“Wait, you think that Myron Barsky is stealing $3.37 from the Mane Attraction?” Alice couldn’t wrap her mind around their conclusion.
“And $2.59 from Sparkle, $3.85 from Work It Out, $4.12 from Nowak Plumbing Supply,” Derek said. “It’s cumulative.”
A delicious shiver of gratification ran through her as he quoted the exact amounts of all the discrepancies. Somehow it made her feel that he was paying attention not just to her bookkeeping problem but to her, even though she knew that was slightly crazy. “But only once every four or five months?” she said. “It hardly seems worth it.”
“They appear to have sold thousands of copies of this software, possibly worldwide,” Leland said.
Derek sat back. “It’s a clever scheme when you think about it. They target individual small businesses whose P&Ls are only important to the owners. Most of them probably handle their own books or have a family member do them, so they’re not going to sweat over an occasional tiny discrepancy the way Alice did.”
“In addition, they wouldn’t share the fact that they had the occasional discrepancy with anyone else, so no one would see a pattern. Except Alice.” Leland smiled at her with approval warming his eyes. It felt like a major pat on the back.
She was horrified by the dishonesty of it. And then she was guilt-ridden by her part in the deception. “That’s why it was so inexpensive for such a sophisticated software package. The low price was the one thing that made me leery of recommending it to my clients. It seemed too good to be true.” She laughed without amusement. “And it was.”
“Don’t beat yourself up.” Derek covered her hand where it lay on the table and gave it a brief squeeze of comfort. “You did the proper due diligence.”
The warmth of his skin, the controlled strength of his grip, even the realization that he was touching her sent a roil of delicious heat bubbling through her body and blew every fuse in her brain. When he released her hand and turned to Leland, she nearly wept at the loss.
Keeping her hand exactly where it lay—in case Derek might want to touch it again—she tried to focus on the conversation while she waited for her heartbeat to settle back into a normal rhythm.
Derek’s words began to filter through the haze of longing. Something about having a problem. And he was frowning. “Alice might be on Barsky’s radar after she questioned the hotel manager,” he said.
But Alice had met the hotel manager so she was sure he wasn’t an issue. “I told him I wanted to buy the software, not that I had a problem with it. That wouldn’t send up any red ...” Alice trailed off as she remembered something thatwouldsend up red flags. “Darn it! I posted a question about the discrepancies on a BalanceTrakR help forum the same day I applied to your SBI. Once you got involved, I forgot all about it.”
Derek muttered a low curse as Alice flipped open her laptop and searched for her question. “That’s weird,” she said, scrolling through the site. “It’s not here. I swear this is the right forum. I guess that’s why I didn’t receive notification of an answer.”
“Someone’s got to be monitoring the posts, then.” Leland scowled at his screen. “That’s bad news.”
