Chapter 3 - The Cold Audit
By Monday morning, the spring rain over downtown Chicago was relentless, turning the concrete canyon of La Salle Street into a grey, slick mirror.
I sat in the corner office of Vance Logistics on the forty-second floor, wearing a crisp ivory suit, holding a hot cup of black tea. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, I could see the high-rises stretching toward the lake.
A sharp knock sounded at my office door. Sarah Jenkins, my head of internal forensic accounting, walked in carrying a heavy black binder and a USB drive.
"You were right, Maddie," Sarah said, setting the binder on my desk with a heavy thud. "We ran a deep audit on the auxiliary expense accounts assigned to Bradley over the last fourteen months."
I set my teacup down. "What did you find?"
Sarah opened the binder to a highlighted spreadsheet. "When you gave Bradley the title of 'Vice President of Public Relations' two years ago to help build his resume, you set a strict monthly expense cap of five thousand dollars for client entertainment."
"And?"
"He wasn't entertaining clients," Sarah said, tapping a red line on the document. "He created three separate shell vendors—Brooks Strategic Media, Lakeside Marketing, and B&B Consulting. Over the last year, he funnelled over three hundred and forty thousand dollars from Vance Logistics accounts directly into those three entities."
I felt a cold sensation settle in my stomach. "Where did the money go?"
"We pulled the corporate registry for Brooks Strategic Media," Sarah replied, looking at me with deep sympathy. "The sole managing partner listed on the registration isn't Bradley. It’s his mother, Barbara Brooks."
I leaned back in my executive chair, taking a slow, deep breath.
It all made sense now. The relentless arrogance of his family, Barbara’s sudden mortgage payoff on her Naperville home six months ago, the expensive country club memberships his father had bragged about during Christmas dinner—it hadn't been funded by Bradley’s "smart investments."
They had been systematically leeching off the company I built from scratch while treating me like an outsider who should be grateful for their presence.
"Does Bradley know we ran the audit?" I asked.
"Not yet," Sarah said. "But he’s downstairs in the main lobby right now. Security blocked his keycard at the elevator bay ten minutes ago. He’s causing a massive scene with the receptionist, demanding to see you."
I picked up my desk phone and pressed the speed dial for security. "Marcus," I said to the head of building security. "Send Mr. Brooks up. Alone. And make sure two guards stand outside my door."
Two minutes later, the double oak doors of my office burst open.
Bradley marched in, wearing a wrinkled suit jacket, his eyes bloodshot, his hair unkempt. He looked like a man who hadn't slept in forty-eight hours—which he probably hadn't, considering his personal card had been declined at every hotel in Lake Geneva on Saturday night.
"Are you insane, Maddie?!" Bradley yelled, slamming his hand onto my desk. "My cards are frozen! My car was repossessed from the driveway this morning! My mother is staying in a cheap motel near the highway because she couldn't get into her house!"
"Sit down, Bradley," I said flatly.
"I won't sit down!" he roared. "You humiliated my entire family! You left sixty people standing in the rain like dogs! My father has heart conditions, Maddie! If anything happens to him, I swear to God I will—"
"I said," I raised my voice slightly, my tone so sharp it cut through his rant like a razor, "sit down."
Bradley froze. The sheer authority in my voice hit him like a physical barrier. He swallowed hard, looking around the massive, luxurious office he had bragged about to his friends for years, realizing for the first time that he held zero power within these walls.
He dropped heavily into the leather chair across from my desk.
"You have five minutes to listen to me," I said, sliding the black binder across the mahogany wood until it rested right in front of his hands. "Because if you speak before I finish, the man waiting in the lobby won't be my divorce lawyer. It will be an investigator from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Financial Crimes Division."
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Bradley’s eyes darted down to the binder. He reached out a trembling hand and opened the cover.
When his eyes landed on the name Brooks Strategic Media, his face went completely gray.
