The Tab Nobody Was Supposed to Find
Eleven at night, and the glass conference room at Sterling and Cross still smelled like burnt coffee and printer toner. Jo Marchetti had the Kestrel disclosure schedule open on one monitor and the archived audit file on the other, running the same ritual she had run for three nights straight: check the number, initial the line, move on.
The deal closed Friday. Vantage Capital Partners was buying Kestrel Manufacturing, ninety-one years old, still making the steel brackets holding up half the bridges in the state. Jo's job was small and unglamorous: verify that every exhibit matched its source documents before the partners signed off. Grunt work. Necessary work.
She almost missed it.
The inventory valuation workbook showed six tabs. She had checked all six. But when she reached to close the file, her cursor caught the little scroll arrow at the edge of the tab bar, and a seventh tab blinked into view, tucked past the visible edge of the screen. Unhidden, it looked like, by accident.
final_v2_real.
She clicked it.
The numbers were different. Not wildly different, that was the strange part. Raw materials inventory: forty-one point two million on this tab. Eighty-one point six million on the version everyone in the building was about to sign. Forty million dollars of steel and coil stock that existed on paper and, if this tab was telling the truth, nowhere else.
Jo sat back in her chair. Rounding errors did not hide themselves in tabs named real.
She pulled up the file properties. Last modified two nights ago. 3:07 a.m.
Her phone buzzed, a reminder for tomorrow's nine o'clock closing prep. She silenced it and kept staring, running the math three different ways, hoping she had made a mistake.
She had not made a mistake.
Something made her look up. Through the glass wall, out in the darkened hallway, Raymond Sokolov stood with his phone pressed to his ear and a coffee cup in his other hand, and he was looking straight at her. Had been, she realized, for longer than she wanted to guess.
He said something into the phone, still holding her gaze. Then he hung up, set the cup down on the hallway table, and started walking toward the conference room door.