Page 38 of Crude Heir

“Come on.” I place a hand at her hip, giving her a little squeeze. “I’m starving.”

“Mmm, breakfast sounds fantastic.” She scans the area, reaches out for the T-shirt she borrowed, and drags it over her head.

“Yup.” I sigh, disappointed to not even get a quick glimpse of her body. Maybe I’ll talk her out of the shirt after she has a chance to eat. “I went to the office earlier and grabbed a laptop for you. Then picked up breakfast on the way back.”

“Wait.” She pops her head through the collar, her eyes open wide. “You brought me a laptop?”

“Good grief.” I sit back, shaking my head while she pulls the shirt down over her hips. “You have a one-track mind.”

“Come on.” She pushes against my arm. “We have work to do.”

I stand, letting her get out of bed. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be since I don’t know the business.”

“That’s okay. I’ll walk you through what you need to look for,” she says, stepping around me on her way out the door.

* * *

Derrick

I lost Nicole after the spreadsheet exported. We’ve been at this for hours, with barely a break for pizza delivery at lunch. I’m already thinking steak for dinner, but the woman looks determined enough to keep going until she finishes. I guess I pegged her right when I said she had a one-track mind.

“This is so much easier to follow with a report. I didn’t need this kind of detail when I ran the other states.”

I look up from the screen. “Why is this one different?”

“South Texas is a rich find. If I recall correctly, it’s listed as the single largest hydrocarbon-producing geological formation in the world.”

“I didn’t realize that.” Not that I’ve ever had reason to take interest in anything to do with my mother’s side of the job.

“That’s why it seems so odd that the company started showing a steady decline in profits.”

I’m still baffled by the fact so much money can be missing, and nobody’s worked out something’s wrong. “So, what happened to all the work they did?”

She takes a bite of cold pizza. “If they had wells close to the production stage, they went ahead and finished. The DUCs, drilled-but-uncompleted wells, were put through a review process, and most were ultimately plugged and abandoned. Only a few made it through to completion.”

“Where were those?”

“Primarily on the new lease at the de Marco Ranch.”

The old man’s probably playing nice. Until recently, nobody’s had business with the de Marcos in decades. Regardless of how much they were offered, the de Marcos always turned it down. They stated they didn’t want people traipsing all over their land. When I brought up the fact Addler de Marco was my friend and interested in leasing, they jumped on the opportunity. “You didn’t find anything that looked wrong?”

“It’s hard to pinpoint because the company started changing billing codes in the middle of projects.”

That was detailed in the report Mom sent over. “That makes no sense to me. Why would you just start making such radical changes in the middle of a big project?”

She grimaces. “I don’t know that they meant to do it that way. Keep in mind that a lot of the consultants move from one location to another. Sometimes within the same lease, sometimes from one state to another. They kept using the codes they were familiar with.”

“Oh.” Again, something I wasn’t aware of.

She blows out a breath. “Add to that the fact these invoices can run months behind. Then one of the managers started recoding a ton of invoices. It created kind of a billing nightmare, but it’s something that can be fixed on the back end by adding a VLOOKUP in the spreadsheet.”

I’m getting how this could be missed. “I get the system is old, but why would you have so much trouble if it’s a spreadsheet?”

“It’s the number of line items in the report. Look at it this way, if you have someone who’s going to check wells in a certain area, the cost for that pumper has to be broken down per pad, and each pad could have six, ten, or twelve wells.”

“So that’s easily hundreds of lines.”

“That’s for just one person,” she points out, holding up a finger. “The new coding system makes it easier to track all the work being done but it adds a lot of invoices, and those invoiceshave a lot of line items. Each month can potentially have millions of entries.”

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