Page 45 of Justice Denied

“How old was he?”

“Ten.”

“Impressive that he could capture the essence of the lake at such a young age.” Seth sounded genuinely impressed.

“That’s why I display it.” Dolores joined him in front of the painting. “He’s now studying art at the Pratt Institute in New York. He’s given me better paintings, but this was his first watercolor. Every time he visits, he begs me to replace it with a more recent, better executed painting, but I enjoy gazing at the potential you can see in his brush strokes than his later polished pieces.” Some of the stiffness eased from her shoulders. “Have a seat and tell me why you think I can help you.”

Seth and Jetta both took the couch while Dolores choose a well-worn easy chair.

“Mrs. Green,” he began.

“Please, call me Dolores.”

“Dolores,” he started again, “as I mentioned, we’re looking into the embezzlement charges levied against her late father.”

Dolores held up her hand. “And you discovered an anomaly with some of the invoices from SafeSense that were attributed to me.”

“That’s correct.”

Jetta repeated to herself she would trust Seth knew what he was doing, allowing the silence to grow rather than filling it with the evidence they had about the fake invoices.

“I couldn’t believe it when Mr. Reinhardt called me into his office and accused me of tampering with invoices.” The older woman’s voice hitched. “I had no idea what he was talking about, but he showed me the invoices I had sent to Topher Robotics.”

“They had been altered after you’d sent them?” Seth’s voice had a gentle tone at odds with his beefy physique.

Jetta admired him for not throwing his weight around to intimate the other woman to get what he wanted.

“They must have been as I didn’t change the amounts.” Dolores dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, alerting Jetta to how troubled the older woman was about the invoices. “I tried to tell Mr. Reinhardt I wouldn’t do something like that, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“We believe you didn’t have anything to do with the altered invoices.”

Jetta shot Seth a glance, but his attention remained fixed on Dolores. The woman could be upset merely because she’d gotten caught.

“You do?” The older woman deflated as if someone had let the air out of her. Her hand fluttered to her chest, resting there for several seconds.

“Yes, we think you were targeted much like Jetta’s father was.” The conviction in Seth’s voice told Jetta he was convinced of Dolores’ innocence.

“But why would someone do such a thing?” Dolores swung her gaze from Seth to Jetta, then back to Seth.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Seth opened a notebook, poising his pen above a blank page. “Would you walk us through exactly what happened?”

Dolores straightened with a decisive nod, her attitude a complete one-eighty from her earlier demeanor. “The thing is, I brought one of the altered invoices to the attention of my supervisor a few weeks before Mr. Reinhardt accused me of stealing money.”

“What did your supervisor say?”

“That she would check into it. I forgot about it until that meeting with Mr. Reinhardt.” Dolores shuddered. “It was awful. When I arrived at work, I couldn’t log onto my computer, but before I could call tech support, Mr. Reinhardt’s admin called me into the meeting.”

“Who was there?” Seth inquired as he wrote down the details.

In spite of her skepticism, Jetta found herself drawn into Dolores’s story.

“Mr. Reinhardt, who was the head of accounting, and my immediate supervisor, Fiona Everly.”

“The one you’d told about the invoice?” Seth clarified.

“Yes.” Dolores firmed her lips as if stopping more words from spilling out. She appeared to be fighting for composure with deep breaths and rapid eye blinks. Then she continued, her voice not as steady as before. “I still didn’t suspect anything until Fiona laid out a stack of invoices for Topher Robotics with the one I had brought to her attention on top. She then asked me to explain why I had been changing the invoice amounts and where the extra money had gone.”

As Dolores explained how the duo had harangued her to confess what she’d done with the money and why she had committed fraud, Jetta saw similarities between Dolores’s story and her father’s. According to her mother, Ryan Topher had engineered a meeting with his two siblings and Dad, laying out the embezzlement charges and requesting Dad’s cooperation in returning the money.

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