Elemental Assassin 01 - Spider's Bite

never took. Diverting company cash flow into offshore accounts. A couple hundred thousand dollars here, a few more there, you’d be surprised how quickly it adds up.”
    I frowned, thinking of the care that had been put into this whole operation, into framing me to take the fall for Giles’s murder. “That sounds too easy, too obvious, too sloppy.”
    Finn shrugged again. “Keep in mind I’ve only been looking at these files for a few minutes. A company as large as Halo would generate hundreds, if not thousands, of files every single day. It’s probably a very delicate operation, but we’ve got the exact, specific files you need to put it all together.”
    “Which is why Gordon Giles spent months collecting information,” Donovan Caine said. “Which is also why he was going to be the state’s star witness. Because he could understand how the money was being diverted and explain exactly where it was going.”
    “Do the files show where the money was going?” I asked. “What it was being used for?”
    Finn clicked a few more times. “Looks like Haley James has hired several new executive vice presidents the past few months. Part of it went to pay their salaries, and I use that word loosely.”
    “Her crew, in other words,” Donovan Caine chimed in. “The men she thought were going to help her take on Mab Monroe.”
    “I’ve also got several payments here made out to Carla Stephenson,” Finn added. “Looks like ten payments of ten thousand dollars each. A hundred grand, total.”
    Donovan’s face tightened. “Carla? That’s Wayne Stephenson’s daughter. She’s ten.”
    “Probably not a donation to her college trust fund then, although that’s what it’s listed as here,” Finn said. “Smart of him, putting it in her name. That’s why it didn’t immediately come up when I ran his financials earlier.”
    “Keep digging,” I said. “I want to know everything there is to know about this scam.”
    We went back to work. Finn surfed files. Donovan squinted at the small print in the folder. And I picked up the stack of Gordon Giles’s porn photos.
    Thankfully, and to my slight surprise, not all of the pictures were of Giles doing vampire hookers every which way he knew how. There was a photo of an older lady I assumed was his mother, and several more of Giles in various locales holding up fish and beaming at the camera.
    Although they were of a different sort than the previous pictures, they were still mementoes, small treasures the accountant had wanted to keep. Giles had probably put them all together so he could grab them at one time when Caine put him in witness protection. And then Charles Carlyle had stumbled across them and hidden them in his fireplace. Given the amount of porn I’d seen in the vampire’s game room, I didn’t have to guess why the hooker photos were on top—and covered with greasy fingerprints and other stains.
    I was almost to the bottom of the stack when I came across a photo that didn’t quite match the others. For one thing, there weren’t any hookers in it. For another, it starred a very different person than Giles’s dead mother.
    Alexis James.
    In the photo, Alexis James wore black Bermuda shorts, a tailored white shirt, and a floppy straw hat. She stood next to some sort of gray shark she’d speared with the gun in her hand. The poor creature hung upside down, its side slit open, guts hanging out for everyone to see. The shark’s blood turned the dock a mottled brown, but Alexis was too busy smiling into the camera to notice it. Classy. Gordon Giles stood off to one side. He was smiling too.
    So Alexis had gone with Gordon on one of his fishing trips and speared herself a shark. Hell, maybe she’d even let the accountant spear her, and they’d had some sort of fishing trip fling.
    I started to put the photo aside, when something caught my eye. A black blob in the middle of the picture. I scraped at it with my fingernail, wondering if it was just dirt that had somehow gotten on the print. But it didn’t come off, and I realized it was part of the picture. What was that around Alexis James’s neck? I held the photo up almost to my nose, but I couldn’t quite make it out.
    I got up and rummaged through one of the junk drawers in the kitchen until I came up with a magnifying glass. Then I sat back down and used it to go over the picture again.
    Instead of the classic string of pearls I’d always seen her with, Alexis James wore a different sort of