Page 39 of Crude Heir

My jaw nearly drops. “You’re kidding, right?”

She chuckles. “Let’s go back to that example where a guy goes out to check the wells. In the end, you’ll have thousands of wells checked per day. Then you have the night crew, which doubles the number. And this happens 365 days a year,” she says, sounding all businesslike. “There are no holidays in the energy business.”

“Which is why it’s been so hard for you to track down this issue.”

“Bingo.” She winks and goes back to flipping through invoices. “It’s easier to drop all of this into a pivot table so I can narrow down the search area.”

“Why didn’t you run a report before?”

“The software is outdated to begin with,” she explains. “And with a minimum number of licenses, it’s usually overtaxed. Trying to compile the data in South Texas while everyone’s working is more than it can handle easily. It’s all or nothing with this thing.” She breaks off a piece of the hard crust from the pizza she had earlier. “Then I can’t get caught with it on my computer, and I’m not allowed to take anything from the system home.”

“And you aren’t allowed to work remotely,” I add.

“You see my problem. If I try and do this during the day, it’ll cause me an issue. You can either run reports or process invoices in the system but not both. The first time I tried this, it showed up in the productivity report. I didn’tdo enoughto justify the hours I submitted.”

“What?” I’ve never heard of anyone going to that kind of detail on payroll.

“The pay audit takes time cards and bumps them up against the key-card log. It was a practice started after someone wascaughtlogging their time incorrectly,” she says, adding air quotes.

“So how are you getting around the work you did the other night?”

“I plan to say I forgot to log off when I went to run errands then I went to lunch.” Her cheeks turn pink again.

The lengths she’s going to for…my father. “I can adjust your time card so you don’t have to lie.”

That finally got her attention. “You can do that?”

I shake my head, laughing at her wide-eyed reaction. “You mentioned having a manager recoding. Is that unusual?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “It’s more of the amount of recoding that caught my eye.”

“Could it be someone trying to cover up what they’re doing?”

“I haven’t found evidence of anything being wrong. In fact, it seems to be corrections.” She shrugs. “It’s justa lotof corrections.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“William Connors.”

“Bill?” The name takes me by surprise. The thought it could be him never crossed my mind.

She chews on her bottom lip. “You know him?”

“I met him when I was down there installing their system.” There’s no way I can go to Addler and tell him a man he introduced as family might be involved. “Are yousure?”

“Like I said, he’s just making a lot of corrections the last few weeks. The coding seems to be correct, and he’s approved them himself.”

“Did you report it?”

“There’s nothing to report,” she exclaims. “He’s changed from the old coding to the new coding system, but sometimes it’s a totally different category. It’s just the volume that caught my attention.”

Or someone with his authority has approved them. “Can you focus on those?”

She nods. “That’s where I am now. But they’ve been doing a lot of work, so there’s a ton of invoices.”

I blow out a breath. “Okay. Let me know if you find anything.” I utter the words with a healthy dose of hesitation. “I’ll get dinner started.”

The overhead light flickers and her shoulders droop. Now I drag in a breath. Without power, there’s no electrical range, thus, no steak. “I’ll order something.” I pick up my phone. “You’d better do what you can, not sure how long the battery’s going to last.”

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