Like Jazz by Heather Blackmore

Author:Heather Blackmore [Blackmore, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Gay & Lesbian, Lesbian, Mystery, (v5.0)
ISBN: 9781626390294
Amazon: B00HCRF30Q
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2013-12-09T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The following week, I continued in my dual capacity as accountant and investigator. The accounting piece was easy; I’d supplemented my undergraduate scholarships with similar part-time work. It was the investigation that was giving me trouble. I couldn’t find the governing consulting agreement between the Foundation and Mastick Consulting anywhere in the filing cabinets or on the server. I wasn’t faring any better at tracking down its owners. After searching the Secretary of State websites for nearly two-dozen states, I finally located a Mastick Consulting in Nevada. Rather, it was a Nevada corporation—I still didn’t know where the business was physically located. But it was strange to find no record of such a company in California given that it was supposedly providing significant services to the Foundation. And wouldn’t actual consultants render those consulting services in person?

The fact that the firm was incorporated in Nevada made it difficult for me to trace its owners. Nevada had privacy laws allowing companies that provided incorporating services to out-of-state organizations to appoint a “designee” for all the offices of the corporation such as president or secretary, such that this random designee—completely unaffiliated with the out-of-state organization—would hold all the offices of public record. Meanwhile, the true owners of the corporation maintained operational control and ownership with complete anonymity. Unless I had a court order, the chances that I could identify the owners of Mastick using any information available to me in Nevada were nil.

I did make headway on another aspect of Mastick, however. During a casual conversation in the break room when Carol and I were eating lunch, I asked about other faces at the Foundation. Carol was ostensibly the receptionist, but she functioned more like an office manager and executive assistant. I’d met the dozen or so employees during my time there, all of whom had multiple roles and expertise regarding the intricacies of its operations. Such variety of knowledge and access made collusion—an inherently difficult scheme to detect that accounted for only two-fifths of all fraud yet five times the financial losses—a very real prospect at the Foundation.

I told her how impressed I was that such a small staff seemed to get so much done. This buttered her up nicely and gave me adequate cover for my questions.

“Doesn’t anyone else help? You know, consultants or firms that work on specific projects? I mean, the fund-raising events alone have to take a lot of planning.” I didn’t want to identify Mastick by name because I didn’t want Carol to think I was concerned about anything or feel I was snooping.

Carol nodded and forked something that resembled pasta in the plastic tray in front of her. “Oh, sure, we might get a temp now and then to help with data entry or filing or something, and we occasionally work with outside event planners to help us keep events fresh and interesting, but really, what you see is what you get. The staffers around here do it all. We’re all very committed to the Foundation.

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