Page 35 of Ghost

I shook my head with a laugh. “At lying?”

“At waiting.”

I twisted around to look up at him as I admitted, “I want to walk into his office and make him look at those pages. I want him to tell me why his initials are on so many of them. I want the answer to give me back the man I thought I knew.”

His hand returned to the back of my neck. “We’ll get the truth.”

I knew the club would be looking harder at Len now. But I also knew that when the answers came, Gavin would be at my side. That made the wait a little bit easier.

14

TAMSIN

“How’re you holding up?”

I flashed Gavin an appreciative smile as he handed me a bottle of water. “I’m hanging in there.”

It’d been a long day, but I felt like we were finally making progress by the time the office emptied down to me, Gavin, a handful of Black Crowns, and the employees who could help explain the records.

The audit had moved beyond counting material. We were tracing how my now proven accurate field reports were altered into final entries. I’d confirmed that the changes became more frequent after I proposed requiring two approvals for every adjustment. But the shared system prevented me from identifying a single employee solely from the electronic records.

Supervisors often used the same terminals, and older reports contained fewer details than the newer ones.

“You ready for Len?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Gavin sent a text to one of his guys, and the operations manager joined us a couple of minutes later.

Len sat down and treated the meeting like I had asked for a training session on something I was already quite familiar with.

“Final counts change.” He shrugged. “Gear comes back damaged. A crew finds a dud in the trailer. Somebody logs a transfer late. It happens.”

“Only in one direction?” I reminded him.

“Several of these jobs were your first solos. You were still learning the system. Easy to drop a number when you’re that young and the show’s already in the books.”

His explanation sounded reasonable, but it was really starting to piss me off that he kept drawing attention to my age.

“There’s a major problem with your theory. A real adjustment has paperwork. Damage form. Transfer. Crew statement. Something.” I tapped the stack. “These don’t.”

Len’s mouth tightened, just barely. But if I caught it, I knew Gavin had too.

Then he waved a hand at the stack like I was making a fuss over nothing. “We’re talking about a few dozen igniters. Not the end of the company.”

It took every ounce of my self-control not to visibly react. Nobody had given him that number. The revised total had come out of my private field sheets and the comparison I just finished.

Gavin met my gaze, and when he smiled, I knew he’d recognized the change in me.

“Maybe you can help me with something,” Gavin murmured, leaning back in his chair and looking a little lost on purpose. “If somebody isn’t sitting in operations, how do they even see the final totals? I’m having a hard time picturing the process from start to finish.”

Len liked being the expert, so he relaxed and talked. More than he needed to. He named clerks and supervisors who could have made changes. Described his role as general oversight. It was obvious he was trying to guide suspicion toward employees with less authority.

I watched Gavin use the same grin that had once made me think he wasn’t taking any of this seriously. He looked relaxed, but every question closed a door Len didn’t notice.

Len never even saw the contradictions stacking up, but Gavin did. Unfortunately, so did I.

“Thanks, man. That helps a lot.”