Chapter 3 - The Larkspur Anomaly
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The next morning, I woke up before dawn. Evan was still asleep in our penthouse, his chest rising and falling in a steady, peaceful rhythm. I slipped out of bed, took my laptop into the guest bathroom, and locked the door.
I couldn't shake the feeling of the heavy blue folders from the day before.
Logging into the company's secure financial server, I pulled up the Southside masonry project. I bypassed the summary sheets Evan had prepared and dug directly into the raw accounts payable data.
That was when I found the first anomaly.
A payment for $185,000 had been wired to a consulting firm called Larkspur Strategies. The invoice description read: Emergency Masonry Survey - Southside Site.
I frowned. Quinn Restoration had its own in-house surveyors. We never outsourced this specific work. I ran a global search for "Larkspur Strategies" across our entire vendor database.
Eleven results populated on my screen.
Over the last eight months, eleven payments had been authorized and sent to Larkspur. The total came to a staggering $2.3 million. All of them were for emergency consulting at buildings our crews had never physically touched.
My breath caught in my throat. My hands began to shake as I clicked on the authorization signatures for the wire transfers.
There it was, at the bottom of every single fraudulent invoice: Mara Quinn.
May you like
It was my electronic signature. The exact digital stamp Evan had access to as my COO for rushing site emergencies. Someone was bleeding my company dry, stealing millions of dollars, and framing me for the embezzlement.
I looked up at my pale reflection in the bathroom mirror. The man sleeping fifty feet down the hall wasn't just controlling; he was a thief. And I was completely trapped.
