Page 19 of Monochrome (ORCA #4)

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

JULIUS

The twins were waiting by the door when we got home, and I mentally crossed my fingers that they’d had a good day.

It was the first official time Athina had spent the whole day with them, and while she’d sent Ethan several update texts, all with favorable reports, his worry had been palpable.

“Unca E! Afina took us to the park.” Jude jumped up and down, obviously excited about something.

“Cal said he is a sea panda! I want to be a sea panda!” Lily jumped around too, pretending to swim through the air with her cheeks puffed out like she was holding her breath.

Ethan looked up at me, an eyebrow raised, and all I could do was shrug.

If he thought I could control anything Cal did or said, he was sorely mistaken.

He squatted down so he could look Jude in the eye.

“That’s awesome, bud. Did you have fun?”

“I went down the big slide.” Jude mimed whooshing down a slide, and Ethan caught Lily around the waist, pulling her into a hug.

“Cal isn’t a sea panda, Lil. He’s an orca shifter.”

Lily stopped squirming in her uncle’s grasp, the air leaving her cheeks in a loud, disappointed raspberry.

“Isn’t that the same thing? Cal said it’s the same.”

Athina was standing near the hallway that led into the rest of the house, watching the exchange with a slightly exasperated look on her face and her arms crossed.

“Were they okay for you today?” Ethan asked, standing up to his full height again.

Athina smiled. “Lily and Jude were great. I just didn’t know I would be babysitting three children today.”

“Three?” Ethan looked confused.

“Cal,” Athina and I said at the same time.

“I tried to put him in a time-out, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” Athina blew her bangs out of her face.

“I’ll talk to him. Where is he?” I glanced past where she was standing, but I didn’t see Cal in the kitchen.

“He and Jack went to see the guy at the body shop. Apparently, they don’t keep normal business hours.”

Ethan and I exchanged a look, and I knew we were both hoping they would come back with a lead.

“Marcus wants to see you when you get a chance. I promised to let you know.” Athina corralled Lily and Jude toward the kitchen.

“Come on, you guys. Let’s go clean up the table.”

The twins grumbled, but ran down the hall into the kitchen, where I could see a bunch of art supplies laid out on the table.

“Sea pandas?” Ethan asked when the twins were out of earshot.

“I mean, it is kind of true.”

Ethan shook his head, and I pulled him in for a quick kiss.

“Do you want to change first or go to see Marcus?”

“Let’s change. Might as well be comfortable if we’re going to have to face bad news.”

He started toward the stairs, and I followed him up.

“What makes you think it’s going to be bad news?”

Ethan glanced at me over his shoulder.

“Do you really think it’s going to be good?”

“No, but it might be a lead.”

He shrugged.

“Maybe.”

It wasn’t, in fact, good news.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in the basement, watching the monitors as Marcus ran us through what he’d found.

Someone had been skimming out of the Grove Core global funds for what looked like years.

Every time the offshore account the embezzler was using hit a certain dollar figure, they split the money up and ran it through several different shell companies, including AB Holdings.

“So we can trace that back to the originating party, right?” Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose as he asked the question.

Marcus hesitated for a second, and I knew the other shoe was about to drop.

“I already did.”

“And?” I gestured for Marcus to get to the point.

“And all the transactions trace back to either Tessa or Ethan.”

Ethan looked like he’d just been slapped.

“What did you just say?”

Marcus pulled up the internal Grove Core transaction records and set them up side by side with the deposits into the offshore accounts.

Ethan stepped closer and scrutinized the dates.

“What the fuck?”

“What is it?” I stepped up next to Ethan, trying to figure out what he was looking at.

“Right here.” He pointed to one of the lines.

“This is the day Tessa died. Look at the time stamp.”

According to the transaction record, the transfer was approved by Tessa Li at ten forty-five at night.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Tessa and Owen were DOA. I got the call at eight. She was already gone when this transaction was approved.”

“Marcus, is there any way Tessa could have approved the transaction earlier in the day and it didn’t go through until that night?”

He shook his head.

“No. The list you’re looking at is the origination time. That transaction would have gone through in minutes. It doesn’t show as hitting the offshore account until the next day, but it was definitely initiated the day she died.”

“Can Felix figure out who used Tessa’s credentials to approve this?”

Marcus shook his head again.

“We tried that when we were looking into yours. From what we can access, it’s really you. Felix has been working on a program to trace the IP addresses, but whoever is doing this is bouncing the IP around so much that it’s nearly impossible to trace back. We need them to get desperate and try to do something quickly without the precautions they’ve been taking.”

Reaching out, I gave Ethan’s shoulder a squeeze.

“I think you might have done that today.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told the board you were locking down the finances, and you had Rebecca send out that company-wide memo. No spending can be done without your say-so. Maybe that will make whoever this is desperate enough to try something stupid.”

“You locked down the finances?” Marcus sounded impressed.

“Smart move. Without the day-to-day movement of funds through the company, we might be able to pinpoint the leak.”

“Hopefully.”

Marcus spun his chair back to his computer.

“There’s one more thing.” He swapped the screens out for a different set of financial records.

“I found two transactions directly from Grove Core accounts that don’t make sense.” He highlighted two lines on the monitors.

“I’m sure you recognize this as a Grove Core general ledger sheet for one of your raw materials vendors.”

Ethan folded his arms over his chest. “We pay the vendor via EFT in consistent twenty-five-thousand-dollar increments since we take deliveries of the same amount of these particular raw goods every week.”

“Right. That is all these transactions here.” Marcus moved the cursor around the screen, indicating all but the highlighted transactions.

“These two transactions are into different accounts. This account is only deposited into twice. Look at the dates.”

“Fuck me running. That second one is this past Thursday.” I pointed to the line Marcus had highlighted near the bottom of the ledger.

“And that one is two days before Tessa died.” Ethan’s face had lost a shade of color.

“I think whoever killed your sister hid the payoff in Grove Core’s general ledger.”

“Who is responsible for paying this vendor?” Marcus had pivoted in his chair and was rolling his pen between his fingers again.

“The manufacturing department. My chief manufacturing officer, Alice Pace, makes sure the payments are made for the US plant, and my uncle is the CMO on the global side.”

“Who else would have access to these accounts?” Marcus stopped twirling the pen as he worked through the information Ethan was giving him.

“The CFO, CEO, and COO.” Ethan rubbed a hand over his face.

“Probably anyone in accounts payable as backup.”

“Can I ask a different question?” I wanted Marcus to go in a different direction since I knew they’d already run most of the Grove Core C-suite through background checks.

My cousin nodded. “Sure.”

“Instead of approaching this from the Grove Core side, can you figure out who the anomaly account belongs to?”

Marcus smirked.

“Way ahead of you, Jules.” He spun around to face the computer again and pulled up a profile.

“It took some time since the payments passed through several different accounts in a handful of countries, including one owned by our good friend, Gaspard Malveau—I’ll come back to that in a second—but the funds eventually made their way stateside and into an account owned by this guy. Rogan Holt. He’s a rhino shifter who used to be an enforcer for Malveau’s operation. He’s bounced around the globe doing mercenary work for the highest bidder. I gave Cal and Jack his photo, and they were going to flash it around the body shop to see if he was the guy who had the mods made to the Hellcat.”

“Do we have any idea where Holt is now?”

Marcus shook his head.

“No. Eli did a fly-by at an address he was allegedly using here in Seattle, but it was an abandoned warehouse. As far as we can tell, Holt isn’t in the country, but he’s also got a list of aliases a mile and a half long, so that doesn’t mean much. Felix is working on it, but the only way to get a positive ID is to run facial recognition, so he has a program running to look at all the traffic camera footage and all the airport cameras, but so far, nothing has pinged. He also has a few feelers out on the dark web for a guy with Holt’s specific skill set.”

“Who is Gaspard Malveau? That name sounds really familiar,” Ethan asked.

“Black-market diamond trader. He is the one who officially bought the painting at the auction in Amsterdam, but we know he was actually working with someone else.” I gave Ethan the abridged version because I’d already filled him in on everything that had happened in Amsterdam.

“And now he’s somehow related to my sister’s murder?” Ethan looked confused.

“Maybe. Tangentially at best. Unless Grove Core is somehow tied into the blood diamond trade.” Marcus’s words weren’t meant to be hurtful, but Ethan flinched like he’d been slapped.

“At this point, I don’t know what to think.” He hung his head, his shoulders rolling forward like he was carrying the weight of the world on them.

Marcus’s phone vibrated on the desk, and he grabbed it.

“What’s up, Cal?” He pulled the phone away from his ear.

“Hold on. Ethan and Julius are here. I’m putting you on speaker phone.”

“Holt is the guy. We got one of the mechanics to talk. He says Holt picked up the Hellcat, but he wasn’t the one who paid for it. According to the guy who spoke to us, his boss was bitching about some rich guy paying for a rush job. They had to get all the mods done in under a week, then the asshole got in some sort of accident and the front end needed to be fixed a week later. He was pissed as hell that he didn’t get paid overtime for all the extra hours he put in.”

“Sounds like that’s definitely the car that killed Tessa.” Marcus chewed his lip as he looked for a new angle.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think there was one.

“Did he have any idea where Holt is now?” I already knew the answer, but I felt I had to ask anyway.

“No clue. And, Jules, trust me when I say this is the kind of place where no one is asking too many questions.”

“I’m going to have Eli put out an APB for a Dodge Charger Hellcat. There can’t be that many in this area. We need to track down Holt to see if we can find out who hired him. We’ll see you back here.” Cal agreed, and Marcus ended the call, then tapped at his screen, sending a text to Eli.

When he was done, he looked up at us.

“Guess all we can do now is wait.”

Ethan’s jaw went tight.

“I fucking hate waiting.”

“Me too, E. Me too.”