"Now you're talking." Matt began to read, ticking vendors off the list so quickly at first, I had to slow him down. We'd gone through about twenty names, and he was getting bored and speeding up again, when I heard it.

"Stop. Back up and read me that last one."

"Cavenaugh Leasing?"

"That one just after that."

"Crescent Consulting."

"Crescent Consulting? Not Security?"

"Believe it or not, I can read."

"Majestic made payments to Crescent Consulting? Is that what that means?"

"Yep."

"Before the merger?"

"That's what this says."

"How much?"

Pages shuffled at his end while I looked around for my briefcase. Where the hell had I dropped it? The room wasn't that big.

"Roughly three quarters of a million bucks over eight months."

"Three quarters of a million?" My heart thumped an exclamation point. "That's it. That's got to be it."

"Got to be what?"

The corner of my briefcase peeked out from under the bedspread. I dropped to my knees, opened the case, and found the file on Crescent inside. With the phone wedged between my shoulder and ear, I began digging, looking for Molly's computer printout. "What was the timing of the payments, Matt?"

"Three installments-two hundred thousand in October '94, two hundred more in December of that year, and three hundred in July of '95."

I sat on the floor, leaned back against the bed, and flipped through the printout until I found what I needed. Molly had said that the IBG contract vote had ruined everyone's Thanksgiving. I'd made a note of the specific date-November 20, 1994. So, a payment in October, the contract vote in November, and a payment in December. Merry Christmas, Lenny.

"When did the Majestic-Nor'easter deal close?"

"July 21, 1995."

And one big incentive bonus the next year when the deal closed.

"Are you going to tell me what this Crescent Consulting is?"

"I told you before. It's that local vendor used by Nor'easter in Boston in the early nineties, allegedly for background checks and other odd jobs. It turns out that Crescent Security is also Lenny Caseaux. I suspect Crescent Consulting is, too."

"Can't be. It's a conflict of interest to be the vendor providing services to the company you work for."

"He didn't provide any services."

It took him a nanosecond to work through the logic. "No way."

"Way."

"That's embezzling."

"Yes, indeed." I flipped the printout closed and got to my feet so I could pace. "When Lenny Caseaux was the GM in Boston, he stole over two hundred grand from Nor'easter by paying fake invoices to this Crescent Security company. It was nickel-and-dime stuff- it took him five years-and it didn't seem like enough to buy a union contract. But seven hundred thousand in ten months would be plenty."

"Buy a contract? You lost me."

"Lenny paid Big Pete to make sure Nor'easter's IBG contract proposal failed."

"Who's Big-"

"Pete Dwyer," I said. "He runs the union up here."

"Lenny bought the contract-"

"-to make the merger happen." I paced around the bed and back again. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

"And then got Majestic to pay for it." Matt was getting into it now. "Brilliant. The guy's a genius."

"A genius? I think you're missing the bigger picture here."

"Okay, so he's an evil genius. I never would have guessed that Lenny Caseaux had the brains to pull off something like this and not get caught. Contract fraud, election tampering-you're talking federales here. The FBI. Probably the Securities and Exchange Commission since it impacted the value of the company. Definitely fertile ground for shareholder lawsuits. No wonder everyone wants to keep this buried. And he got away with it."

"That's the part I don't get. I can understand how he could approve payments to himself at Nor'easter, although why the auditors didn't catch it, I'll never know."

"From a financial controls standpoint, Nor'easter was a nightmare. That part would have been easy. The genius of the plan was getting Majestic to fund the payoffs."

"How could he have done that? He didn't work for Majestic at the time, and he couldn't approve those payments himself."

"You said that Crescent was a security company." I could hear Matt sucking on his pen as he talked, something he always did when he was into heavy thinking.

"A fake security company."

"Lenny could have set up Crescent as a provider of consulting services to the deal. As part of due diligence, they could have been hired to review training programs, check compliance, test checkpoints, stuff like that. With a deal like this, you can do just about anything. You've got consulting fees all over the place, and it just becomes part of the negotiation as to who's going to pay for what. He probably got an agreement that Crescent could bill Majestic instead of Nor'easter. It even makes sense because Nor'easter was short on cash at the time. And the fact that it was a pre-purchase adjustment makes it that much easier to hide. There's no budget, and two hundred grand a pop wouldn't really stick out compared to the other charges on this list." He snorted. "You should see the attorneys' fees."

"So Lenny and the other Nor'easter investors who wanted to cash out of the airline business anyway figured out a way to get Majestic to pay the kickbacks which ultimately insured that Majestic would buy their company-at a profit. And Lenny apparently set it up."

"I told you, pure genius," he said.

"I still don't get how he could even get Crescent considered as a vendor. As you said, someone would have to negotiate that."

"That's easy. Lenny Caseaux sat on the negotiating team for Nor'easter."

"He did?"

"Yeah, I thought you knew that. That's where I met him."

"Did Ellen know him back then?"

"We all knew him. He's not exactly shy. And he was always hanging around Ellen."

I thought about what Molly had said about how Ellen might have responded to Lenny, to someone who showed interest in her. "Did they seem… did they know each other well?"

"Who?"

"Lenny and Ellen."

"They spent a lot of time together, which is why it makes sense that she's the inside person."

"Ellen?" The spiral phone cord caught on the frame at the foot of the bed and nearly sent the phone flying.

"As you pointed out, Lenny needed someone on the team to approve his invoices and not ask questions. Lenny Caseaux and Ellen Shepard spent so much time together people started thinking they had a thing going on. So it works like this: Lenny-who-is-Crescent sends her the invoices and she approves them. Majestic cuts a check to Crescent and the paperwork goes to file. Lenny buys the contract, the deal goes through, and he and his pals cash in. Ellen gets her promotion to a job for which she has not a single qualification. And there you have it. Makes perfect sense."

"Do you have any proof at all for what you're saying, or is it all just conjecture?"

"What do you think happened to the original of Ellen's pre-purchase agreement schedule, the one that was in archives?"

"I have a feeling you're going to tell me."

"Ellen swiped it."

"What are you talking about?"

"After she called me and I told her where she could find the files, she flew to Denver, went out to the archives warehouse, and took it."

"How do you know this?"

"When the archivist couldn't find the file, I took a ride out there just to make sure he knew what to look for. When my secretary made the request, all she'd given him was a reference number. When I described to him the schedule that I wanted and told him that it was in the merger files, he told me that Ellen had been there in person. In the flesh."

"Does he know her?"

"He doesn't get that many visitors, and he remembered her red hair. It reminded him of his sister. She asked him to show her where the merger files were. Who else could it have been? Something must have happened to make her think that it was going to come out and she needed to hide the evidence."