CHAPTER 1: The Audit
The elevator opened directly into his office.
That was the first wrong thing. No lobby, no assistant, no buffer zone of marble and expensive art to remind visitors where they stood in relation to Damien Voss. Just thirty-eight floors of steel cable and then — him.
He was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows with his back to me, looking out over the city the way men like him always did — like they owned it, which, in a meaningful percentage of cases, they actually did.
“Miss Calloway,” he said, without turning around. “You’re four minutes early.”
“I was told punctuality was important to you.” I set my briefcase on the chair across from his desk. A chair, I noted, that was positioned several inches lower than his. Classic. “I erred on the side of early.”
He turned then, and I catalogued him the way I catalogued everything: six-two, dark hair gone slightly silver at the temples, the kind of face that was too precise to be called handsome and too arresting to be called anything else. Mid-forties. Grey eyes that moved over me with the same assessing quality I was applying to him.
I had been hired to audit Voss Industries’ subsidiary accounts. Three months of work. I had done this nine times before with nine different corporations, and I had never once found the number that didn’t exist, the ledger entry that pointed somewhere it shouldn’t, the ghost in the machine. I was good at this because I did not get impressed. I did not get distracted. I did not care about the view.
“Your firm comes highly recommended,” he said. He moved to his desk and sat, which put us at eye level — the chair height differential neutralized. Intentional or accident, I couldn’t tell. “Three forensic audits resulting in criminal referrals. One that resulted in a prosecution.”
“Four audits resulting in criminal referrals,” I said. “The fourth was finalized last month.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise — men like him didn’t do surprise publicly — but an adjustment, like a dial turning one degree. “I see Harrington’s firm keeps current.”
“I keep current. It’s my work.” I opened my briefcase and removed the preliminary scope document. “I’ve reviewed the materials your legal team sent. I’ll need unredacted access to accounts payable, accounts receivable, the offshore holding structures registered in the Cayman filing from 2021, and your internal transfer records going back five years.”
Silence.
It was the particular quality of silence that preceded negotiation, and I had learned to sit inside it without flinching.
“That’s an expansive scope,” he said.
“Forensic audits are expansive by nature. If you wanted a cursory review, you hired the wrong firm.”
He looked at me for a long moment. I looked back. The city glittered behind him, fifty billion dollars of personal net worth in a charcoal suit, and I thought: you have something in those accounts you don’t want found. Everyone did. The question was always what kind of something.
“My CFO will assign you a workspace,” he said finally. “You’ll have access to the materials you’ve requested, with the exception of the 2021 Cayman structure, which is under separate legal review and cannot be accessed by external parties during that process.”
“I’ll need documentation of that legal review by end of week or I’ll note the limitation in my preliminary findings.”
The dial turned again. This time I was fairly certain it was amusement, though it didn’t reach anything as accessible as a smile.
“Of course,” he said. “Is there anything else you require, Miss Calloway?”
“Coffee,” I said. “Black. And a contact number for your CFO that actually reaches a human being, rather than the automated system I was routed to three times this morning.”
I saw it then — brief, involuntary, there and gone. Actual amusement. He reached for the phone on his desk and said something brief to whoever answered. Then he stood, which was a dismissal, and I stood too.
“My assistant will take you down,” he said. “Welcome to Voss Industries.”
I picked up my briefcase. The elevator was waiting when I reached it, which meant he had called it before I crossed the room, which meant he had been watching me move.
I filed that away and rode down thirty-eight floors to start finding his secrets.
The CFO was a compact, efficient woman named Helen Marsh who had the look of someone who had been managing chaos for decades and had made her peace with it. She showed me to a glass-walled office adjacent to the finance floor, introduced me to the two junior analysts I’d be working with, and then paused in the doorway.
“He doesn’t usually do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Take the first meeting personally. We have a VP of legal for external engagements.” She studied me with the same assessing quality I had noticed in him, though hers was warmer. “He specifically requested to meet you himself.”
I set my laptop on the desk. “I’ll need the file access permissions active before nine tomorrow morning.”
She smiled — not unkindly — and left.
I sat down in my new office, opened the preliminary scope document, and wrote in the margin: Cayman 2021. Separate legal review. Verify independently.
The first rule of forensic accounting: the thing they won’t show you is always the thing that matters.
