Chapter 5 - Someone at My Desk
I showed the message to Sofia before I answered it. She told me not to reply and forwarded it to the investigator assigned to the suspected fraud.
"A warning isn't proof," she said. "But don't ignore it."
At Harbor Structural, Imani had the office's access report waiting. The forged documents were generated on evenings when I had not been there. One badge had opened the locked design suite each time.
"Tom Keene," she said.
Tom was our document coordinator, a quiet forty-two-year-old who kept spare batteries in every desk drawer and always remembered birthdays. He'd worked with us for six years.
"Maybe someone borrowed his badge," I said.
"Then he needs to tell us."
Tom arrived with a paper cup of coffee, noticed the printed access logs, and stopped smiling.
"I was helping Ryan clean up the permit files," he said. "June told me to."
"I did no such thing."
"He said you were swamped with your dad." Tom's eyes jumped from me to Imani. "I wasn't doing engineering work. I was uploading files."
"Did you use my signing credentials?"
"No. I didn't even have them."
Imani asked Tom to surrender his badge while the company preserved its records for an outside investigator. He grew angry fast.
"You think I'm a criminal because your marriage blew up?"
"My marriage didn't create a fake inspection," I said. "A person did."
He walked out without touching his coffee.
Afterward, I sat alone in the conference room looking at a photograph of my father taped to the wall. Dad had built kitchen cabinets for forty years. He always said a crooked hinge could be fixed; lying about whether it was straight was the part that ruined people.
Sofia called just before sunset. "June, Diane has given police a written statement. She says you attacked her without warning and Ryan intervened to protect her."
May you like
"The camera shows what happened."
"I know. But that's not all. She says you threatened to falsify the construction reports unless Ryan paid you."
