Ex Delicto (6 page)

Xavier

When Aiden and I woke up the next morning to his alarm, the two of us were still naked in his bed. I curled up, self-conscious, as Aiden reached over me.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice muffled and groggy. He hit the snooze button and put his arms back around me.

“We should get up,” I said.

“Just give me a few minutes,” he said. “I don’t want to let you go yet.”

He relaxed against me and immediately fell back asleep. But I was wide awake.

Last night had been a turning point. I knew that. It wasn’t just that we’d had sex. And it wasn’t just that we hadn’t had sex on the couch but in his bed, and we hadn’t spent the night in separate beds but in the same bed. It wasn’t just that. It was that I’d told him about Tony. I’d revealed personal stuff that I’d never revealed to anyone.

I couldn’t take that back. Not that I necessarily wanted to. I’d been afraid Aiden would judge me for getting into a relationship like that. I sure as hell judged myself for it. But he hadn’t. He just said he was sorry. I hadn’t been expecting that.

And yeah, maybe it was partly that we’d had sex. And that the sex had been great.

I let myself run a finger down Aiden’s arm to his hand. I hesitated, then held on gently to his hand so he didn’t wake up.

I was happy, and yet I wanted to cry.

I knew then that I was already in love.

I sat at my desk alone. Aiden and Greg were in a partners’ meeting, so I had some time to myself with not much to do until they got out. This was the opportunity I needed to explore the financial data a little more. Other than that quick period of time yesterday before Aiden had come into work, I hadn’t had any time on my own with the data. My time had been pretty strictly regimented. Not to mention that my personal time was now taken up as well.

Once again Aiden and I had woken up too late to eat breakfast, not surprisingly, considering our hours, and I grabbed my usual coffee and sugary food from the cafeteria, this time a fruit tart. I turned on my laptop and took a sip of coffee and a bite of the fruit tart while I waited for it to boot up.

I hadn’t really been focused on work. Not as much as I would’ve liked to have been. Too much of my thoughts had been taken up by Aiden. And now that I was so clearly in love with him, that probably wasn’t going to change any time soon.

I pulled up the fraudulent transactions and the regular transactions and put them up side by side. Doing that, I noticed something new. The fraudulent transactions happened very quickly – Patterson was only logged in for thirty seconds – whereas normally he was logged in for several minutes when executing a transaction. It was odd. With the normal transactions he was slow, but when he was doing a fraudulent transaction he had never done before, suddenly he was fast?

It was still all circumstantial. Any prosecutor would argue that he wanted to get in and get out quickly with the fraudulent transactions so no one would notice anything. With the regular ones it didn’t matter if he took his time. But he was already logging in at night so no one would notice. Did he really need to be quick on top of that? Or could it really have been someone else doing it at their own quicker pace? There were just too many contradictions. I didn’t like it.

I wasn’t going to figure this out in the short time that Aiden and Greg were in the partners’ meeting. I decided that even if I had to work on this from home, provided I ever went home for more than thirty minutes, I would get to the bottom of this.

I copied every transaction Patterson had anything to do with and pasted them all into a huge word processor file. I highlighted all the fraudulent transactions and changed them to a red font. I saved the file and gave it a quick once-over before closing it.

And my heart jumped into my throat.

“This isn’t right…” I said, but it was right in front of my eyes.

The employee numbers were all wrong. The name was the same but the numbers weren’t. Suddenly there was a one letter difference between the employee numbers in the regular transactions and the employee numbers in the fraudulent transactions.

It wasn’t possible. I’d been over these numbers a thousand times, and so had Aiden and Greg. I looked back at the original file. Sure enough, they were all the same.

I looked back at the word processor file. The only difference was the font. The default word processor font was not the same as the font the company used in their records. And there was a crucial difference.

The number one and the lowercase el in the company’s font looked exactly the same. And in the word processor’s font, it didn’t.

That’s how I saw that what had looked like the number one in Michael Patterson’s regular employee number was actually a lowercase el.

Aiden

Greg and I stood staring at Xavier’s computer screen in shock.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Greg said.

“I never would have known if I hadn’t copied it into a word processor file,” Xavier said. He was leaning back in his chair so we could see the screen, remarkably calm considering how huge a discovery this was.

I hadn’t just underestimated Xavier. I had severely sold him short. He was straight up amazing. Damn near genius, a hard worker, and gorgeous. How had I landed someone so perfect? I had no doubt in my mind that if he stuck around he’d beat my record for the youngest person in the firm to make partner.

I took a deep breath. “So someone went in and created a fake Michael Patterson account to use for these fraudulent transactions so they could frame him. Why not find out his password and just use his actual account?”

“I don’t know,” Xavier said.

“Maybe they weren’t able to,” Greg said. “It sounds easier, but Michael was pretty careful with his information, or so he says. He told me he had all kinds of shit on his computer. Scramblers, scrubbers, stuff like that. He probably would have found out and reported it. So this way he looked suspicious because he didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t someone notice that there were two Michael Pattersons in the computer working for this company though?” Xavier asked.

“It’s all automated,” Greg said.

“Plus thousands of people all over the country work for this company,” I said. “Michael Patterson is not that uncommon a name. If anyone saw it they probably didn’t think anything of it.”

“I see,” Xavier said.

“Though, speaking of which,” I said. “If this second Michael Patterson is in the computer and he’s logging in, isn’t he being ‘paid’ for that, ostensibly? Where is that money going? And if he isn’t being paid, who authorized that?”

Greg nodded. “I’m on it,” he said. He rushed down the hall into his office.

I put my hand on the back of Xavier’s chair. I shook my head and let out a breath. I was still reeling a little. “Good catch. Really good catch,” I said to Xavier.

He gave the sweetest little smile and said, “Thanks.” Then he smirked. “That means a lot coming from a hard ass like you.”

I smiled. “Shut up.”

I sat down in one of the chairs and pulled up beside him, fully in work mode. “Have you copied all the transactions? Let’s see if there’s anything else the second Michael Patterson did that the police didn’t catch.”

Xavier copied the employee number for the second Michael Patterson and searched the document.

“Hey look, there’s one,” Xavier said, pointing at the screen. “This wasn’t marked as fraudulent in the files.”

“Fantastic,” I said. I studied it. “It’s earlier than all the others. And it’s in the middle of the day. And it’s only five dollars even. No wonder the police didn’t see it.”

“Was this a test transaction? To see if it raised any red flags in the system?” he asked.

“Looks like it,” I said.

Greg came back in the room. “I called the company and they can spare one of their lawyers to work with you on this. Xavier, since you caught this, do you want to go down to the office and investigate?”

“Of course,” Xavier said, standing up and powering down his laptop.

Greg turned to me. “Aiden, can you go with him? I’ve got to hold down the fort here, plus Patterson’s attorney will be calling soon. He’s not answering his phone so I’m assuming he’s already in court.”

“Sure,” I said.

As I grabbed my coat, Greg handed me a slip of paper.

“That’s the address,” he said. “Ask for Tricia Stevens, she’s the one I talked to on the phone. She should hook you up.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a quick look at the address before stuffing the slip in my pocket. I looked up at Xavier. “You ready?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“Let’s go.”

Xavier

We’d been in the cab for almost twenty minutes and I hadn’t said a word.

It had just started to hit me. I had stumbled upon a criminal operation.

I mean, what else could it be? Someone had made a fake account under the name of Michael Patterson, with an employee number that looked exactly like that of the real Michael Patterson, for the express purpose of making fraudulent transactions that looked like the real Michael Patterson had done them. There was nothing else it could be.

Which meant that I was uncovering the scheme of criminals. I had never had anything to do with a criminal before. I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.

Rain had started to fall. Droplets hit the windows and made jagged little paths as they ran down the side. My eyes were fixated on them. I traced the path of one with my finger.

“What’s on your mind, Xavier?” Aiden said, breaking the silence.

I inhaled a little gasp in surprise. I turned to Aiden and blinked a few times, snapping out of my reverie. “Oh, nothing,” I said. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile, but it felt a little off to me.

And I could tell by the skeptical frown on his face that he didn’t believe me for a second.

Aiden undid his seatbelt and moved to the middle of the backseat. He put my arm around me. “Nothing at all?” he said.

I pushed myself against the back corner of the cab, but that just encouraged him to move in closer. He pinned me into that corner and leaned in.

“Aiden,” I whispered, and angled my head towards the cab driver.

“This is New York. Believe me, he’s seen worse.” He put a finger under my chin and smiled. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I told you. Nothing,” I said. Now even my voice felt off. It was a little strained.

“Uh huh,” he said, and kissed me, muffling any further protest.

I looked over at the cab driver. He was looking ahead at the road and wasn’t paying any attention to us. He didn’t even look bothered. Maybe Aiden was right that the driver had seen worse.

Aiden’s hand was on my face and his tongue was in my mouth. His cologne mixed with the clean scent of soap was intoxicating. I could feel myself heating up.

Fuck it. If the cab driver didn’t care, neither did I.

I closed my eyes and relaxed into the kiss. When Aiden moved over me I allowed myself to be pulled under him. He continued to kiss me, deeper and deeper, as if he were challenging me.

Finally he pulled away, looking a little surprised. His face was still close to mine, and he kept running his hands over my face and through my hair.

He chuckled. “You didn’t put up much of a fight.”

I looked away. I knew it was true. Normally I was so worried about getting caught when I was doing stuff with Aiden. Now I was openly kissing him in front of a cab driver. It wasn’t like me. Then again, I’d never felt this way. “I—”

“What if I do this?” he said, and slowly ran his fingers down the front of my shirt down to my belt.

I started to panic. “Aiden, wait, what are you—”

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he murmured in my ear.

“Just wait a second,” I said.

He started to unbuckle my belt. I could feel my dick tighten up and get hard. If I let this go on any further, I didn’t know how carried away I could get. I was in uncharted territory with this man.

I jolted up in my seat. “Okay, okay! Damn,” I said. I made sure his belt was still on and looked up. I took a deep breath and made sure I still looked presentable. “I guess…I guess I’m just a little freaked out.”

He frowned. “How come?”

“Well, come on, think about what we found,” I said. “Patterson was right, someone framed him. I don’t think whoever that someone is will be too happy we found out about it. And whoever it is probably works in that office, since that’s where Patterson works.”

He sat back. “Oh. I see.”

I sighed. What was he thinking about me right now? “I’m paranoid, I guess.”

“No, not at all,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, we’ve worked on a couple of criminal cases before and no one has so much as left a threatening phone call for me.”

I shrugged. I didn’t doubt that was true. But I also knew that the Dunhill, Dougan & Smith firm was only brought in when the financials of a crime were being investigated, which wasn’t often. And if someone was targeting the lawyer in a criminal proceeding, they would probably target the criminal lawyer.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just worried we’re walking into the lion’s den.”

Aiden put his hand against my face. “Hey, don’t worry. I’ll be there. And I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Jesus Christ. I felt so warm. I’d never felt like this before.

I nodded and pulled away. I sat up fully in my seat and looked back out the window.

I could feel Aiden’s eyes on me for the rest of the cab ride. It hadn’t even occurred to Aiden to be scared of what we had discovered. Maybe I really was overreacting. I felt stupid for being scared. But I felt even stupider that I was still scared.

Scared of exposing criminals and scared of my feelings for Aiden. I was in uncharted territory all over.

The cab pulled over to the curb. “I’ve got this,” Aiden said to Xavier, and took out his wallet.

I nodded and got out, desperate to be out of that cab. Aiden wasn’t in the cab for much longer before I heard him thank the driver and follow me out.

He put my arm around me so gently I thought I’d melt on the spot. “I’ve got this too.”

“No, I can handle it,” I said. It’s not like I could get out of it, and I didn’t want Aiden thinking of me as someone too weak to do the job that needed to be done. “This is work. It comes with the territory, right?”

“Well, it’s not part of the job to be afraid,” he said.

“I’m fine. I promise,” I said, and this time I was sure to make my voice firm.

There was nothing to say after that. We walked to the huge glass double doors leading inside the company building, and I stepped forward and pushed them open. The office had all the markings of a large, successful company. Glossy tile floors, abundant lighting, and a pretty young woman in nice clothes standing behind a rich wooden counter.

Aiden approached her. “Hello. We’re looking for Tricia Stevens’s office.”

She gave him a polite smile. “Fourth floor, room 425. Elevators are to the right.”

“Thank you,” he said.

We walked to the elevators, and in the large quiet room, even our rubber-soled business shoes made loud echoing sounds on the tile. It felt haunting somehow.

But I was determined not to let my nervousness show. Not on the elevator ride up, not walking into Tricia’s office, and not when she brought us into the office of the lawyer on staff so she could introduce us.

Until I saw who the lawyer on staff was.

He was still as gorgeous as ever. He still had that European-style long hair and that bit of stubble. Not to mention that great body.

I felt numb as his eyebrows raised in surprise and he stood up. He held out his hand and all I could do was raise mine up so he could shake it.

“It’s so great to see you again, Xavier,” he said.

“You too, Tony,” I managed.