Page 89 of Mad Rivals
I nod. “My father gave me full access this summer. I don’t think he assumed I’d be looking into it, but I needed access for some other projects I was working on.”
“See if you can search your income statements,” she suggests. “You should be able to get a snapshot of large sums of money coming or going.”
I open the file and click around, but spreadsheets and financials…they’re not really my forte. Yes, I have a business degree, but I really only took two accounting classes, and I may or may not have been getting naked with the class’s TA on the side to help me pass. “How?”
“How is your ledger organized? Can you search by transaction type?” she asks. She starts to move around my desk to take a look, but she freezes. “May I?”
I nod, and I slide my chair back so she can sit on my lap. She takes control of my mouse, and that’s not a euphemism, as she starts to search the books. “This is the same software we use, so I’m sort of familiar with it. I’m not sure where to start, but I do know that typically these big companies don’t pay actual cash, so if there are any fishy cash transactions, that might be a good place to start digging.” She clicks around a bit, and then she finds a search bar and types incash. She clicks a link to cash transactions, and then she sorts from largest to smallest.
And we both immediately see it.
Cash transactions labeledwarehouse expensesandconsultingin amounts well into the tens of millions of dollars populate the screen.
Every single one of them is attributed to one of the same three companies: Vivicorp Commercial Ventures, Peoria Property Group, and Geneva Holdings.
“That seems weird, doesn’t it?” I ask.
She nods, and she pulls out her phone and opens her calendar. “These last few were all deposited on Monday mornings. Isn’t that also a little strange?”
I reach around her to open a search on Vivicorp Commercial Ventures, the one that seems to come up the most. Nothing comes up on a simple search, so I head to a website where I can search businesses.
I drop the name in there, and I find the name of the director of the company.
Vivienne Bradley.
My mother.
My surprised eyes meet Kennedy’s.
What the fuck?
CHAPTER 37: Kennedy Van Buren
Warehouses
My brows dip together as I try to piece out what might be going on. Something illegal, that’s for sure. And my brain chooses that moment for my father’s words to come back and haunt me.
Back when we were in the running for the SCS project and found out that Bradley Group was one of our competitors, my father said that Thomas Bradley has the kind of connections you just don’t fight against.
What kind of connections?
Did he meanillegalconnections?Dangerousones? What am I getting into by digging into this with Madden?
It’s all very fishy, but I also need to handle this with extreme care. He trusted me by asking me to look at this with him, and I need to prove I’m a partner he can trust.
“What about the warehouse transactions?” I ask. “If all these cash transactions are related to warehouses or consulting, maybe we can figure out what’s going on in that warehouse.” It’s the only lead we have to go on right now, but if his dad was doing something illegal in a warehouse—say, storing drugs or weapons or something—then he wouldn’t run it through his real estate development business, right?
If he’s trying to clean dirty money, he might.
“I don’t want him to know that I’m onto him,” Madden says quietly as I stand and walk around the desk to sit across from him. “But I want to find that warehouse and figure out what the hell he’s doing.”
“So let’s go find it,” I say. I’m not quite surewhyI say it. I guess I assume he’ll say that’s a bad idea, or that he needs to do this alone, or any one of a plethora of other ideas that might keep me safe from whatever this could be. He doesn’t say any of that, though.
Instead, he nods. “I have minicamp this week, but I can get out there as soon as Friday. Actually, I can be out there for the next month, really, after minicamp.”
I press my lips together. “I need a reason to get out there. My father just approved me to behere.”
“SCS. I’ll call a meeting for a progress update early next week,” he says.
