Gregor let Gary take care of the rant and retreated to his closet of an office.
4
The entire town of Snow Hill might be panicking, but Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker were not. They were sitting on the only two chairs in Gregor’s “office,” drinking coffee, and playing games on their cell phones. Gregor wondered if these were their personal cell phones or phones the Bureau gave them. Then he realized that he’d been out of the Bureau for so long, he didn’t know what kind of cell phone policy it had.
Molly looked up when Gregor walked in, but Evan stayed staring at his phone intently and saying “Damn!” Molly coughed. Evan looked up and blushed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Gregor said. “You were bored. I don’t blame you. Were you here when the McGuffie’s were arrested?”
“We were sitting in the diner when the cops came in,” Evan said. Then he shrugged. “It was a light and sound show. They were being as conspicuous as possible. And they were getting a lot of help. That woman can really scream her head off when she wants to. Was all this your doing, Mr. Demarkian? You didn’t tell us anything about it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with me,” Gregor said. “I didn’t even see it coming. It was the work of a state police detective with an ego. Did you bring me the information I need?”
“Absolutely,” Molly said.
She stored her cell phone in her pocket and sat forward. Gregor wasn’t sitting at all. Two chairs was as many as the “office” could hold, and nobody was jumping up to offer him a seat. Molly reached into the pocket of her jacket and came up with a sheaf of papers.
“You’ll be glad to know,” she said, “that you turned out to be right. We checked the operating budget, the pension fund, and the construction. The operating budget and the pension fund are both clean, at least on this end. If somebody is embezzling from the pension fund, they have to be doing it at the union national end, and I’m willing to bet they’re not. The AFT has good controls for that sort of thing.”
“And the operating budget?” Gregor asked.
“Well,” Molly said, “a lot of money goes through there on a regular basis. Wages and salaries, though, are the biggest item, and we doublechecked the bank accounts. Everything adds up. We did consider the possibility that there might be a phantom employee, but we doublechecked that, too, and apparently not. The rest of what goes through that budget is large in the aggregate, but small in each individual withdrawal. And we mean small. There’s stuff under five dollars on that list, and nothing over about a thousand at a time except for the sports stuff. And we checked out the sports stuff, and at least from a firsttime overview, it looks clean, too.”
“So,” Gregor said, “that leaves the construction.”
“Yes it does,” Molly said. “And the construction is very interesting indeed.”
She stood up, leaned across to Gregor’s desk, picked up another sheaf of papers and handed it across to him.
“Look at those,” she said. “Dellbach Constuction.”
“Those” were page after page of disclosure documents, all in very tiny print. Gregor looked up at Molly.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll tell you. First, those are the documents Dellbach Construction had to file when it went after the job for the schools complex. If you look carefully, you’ll see some interesting stuff. For one thing, according to the sworn statement, Dellbach Construction only came into existence a month before it bid on this project.”
“Only a month?” Gregor asked.
“Exactly,” Molly said. “And it gets weirder than that if you look beyond the disclosure documents, because not only did Dellbach Construction not exist until a month before it got the project, it doesn’t really exist now. It’s a holding company. It subcontracts the work out in bits and pieces, never the same subcontractor for two phases in a row, never a phase that lasts more than six months, several phases that last only six weeks or so.”
“And the money is completely screwy,” Evan said. “We both spent a lot of the night trying to figure it out, and we know somebody is embezzling something—”
“Somebody is embezzling a lot,” Molly said. “At least five million dollars over the last five years.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “But we don’t know how. And that’s worrying.”
“But the real kicker is at the bottom of the first page,” Molly said. “Take a look at line fourteen. That’s the line that says ‘ownership.’ That’s who owns Dellbach Construction.”