“Here you go, dears,” Rita said, placing the tray on the edge of Nancy’s desk before handing one to Lynn. “Cream and sugar just the way you like.”
Thanking Rita, she took an appreciative sip of the warm, sweet, milky caffeine fix. Rita hovered, and she observed Nancy shake her head slightly toward her mom. Rita slipped out of the room but left the door open. Turning back to Nancy, she waited to see why her friend asked her to come in.
Tapping the file in front of her, Nancy jumped in with her explanation. “I’m looking at Mrs. Hightower’s information.”
Her brow crinkled as she remembered the name from a few weeks ago and tilted her head slightly to the side. “Hightower? Oh, yes, that’s the one whose husband owns the wedding chapel in Gatlinburg? Or rather they both do? The one where I looked at her initial finances and she claims he has hidden assets?”
“That’s right,” Nancy nodded. “She and her husband own Cupid of The Mountains Wedding Chapel.”
In the middle of a sip, she snorted, then began to cough as her coffee went down the wrong way. Finally gaining control of herself, she shook her head. “Oh, my God, couldn’t they come up with a better name? Cupid of The Mountains? It’s hard to believe that it’s one of the most lucrative wedding businesses around!”
Grinning her response, Nancy agreed. “Yep. According to Sally Hightower, their business does very well. And when you looked at her initial financial records, you agreed that his expenditures don’t match their income. She claims that he has hidden assets and is using the business money for other activities.”
“Do you have some new information?”
Nancy leaned forward and crossed her arms on the desk. “Okay, it took me several meetings with Sally to figure out how everything worked for them, but this is what I’ve got. She’s a partner in her husband’s business, but she’s not involved in the day-to-day running. She’s a schoolteacher. They were both older when they got married, and she claims it was her husband’s insistence that she be listed as a co-owner of his business. She has no interest in the running of the wedding chapel but confesses that they’ve enjoyed a nice standard of living with the money that comes in. According to her, they’re not rolling in riches, but it’s certainly better than just her teacher’s salary.”
Lynn’s specialty was not tax accounting, and while it might have been more lucrative to work for a large accounting firm, she ran her own business. Her specialty was forensic accounting and she was also certified as a fraud examiner. She was often called in when businesses were concerned that an employee might be stealing from them or on divorce cases where one partner was concerned that the other partner was hiding assets. When Nancy first asked her to take a look at Sally’s finances, the situation had snagged her interest. A lucrative wedding chapel in the Gatlinburg area could be bringing in a lot of money. But, without all the information, she couldn’t give any definitive information.
“Sally says that she usually just signs the tax forms each year that Errol gets from their accountant. They live in a gated community, but it’s not overly exclusive. She says Errol belongs to a country club so that he can play golf but swears that they don’t live excessively.”
“And the divorce? Call it morbid curiosity, but what happened with the lovebirds?”
“Ah, the tale as old as time.”
“So, while he keeps his wife in a few jewels tucked away in a gated community, his dick’s gone wandering.”
Snorting, Nancy nodded. “She found receipts for jewelry that he had not given her. So, she got pissed and started doing some more digging. She admits that she left all the finances to him, trusting him completely. It seems that he got used to that and was not overly cautious in hiding his other activities. So, it didn’t take her too long to find that he was using the business credit card for hotel stays, expensive dinners, and even a Wedding Chapel Owners conference that he went to in Vegas a few months ago. He took a companion after telling her that it would be boring and there would be no need for her to take time off from her job.”
“Do you have more records than what I looked at a few weeks ago? I could take a look at any new records and see if I can discern if money was spent on the business account for these personal items. Things that the wife essentially paid for since she’s co-owner of the business but she didn’t get the benefit of.”
Nancy’s shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “Honestly? It’s what she thinks he’s doing with more of the business money than just spending it on his other women. She thinks he’s laundering some of it so that he doesn’t have to report it on his taxes, and therefore she never knows about it.”
“No shit!” Now, this is interesting! Lynn loved solving puzzles, especially with accounting fraud cases. She had worked with numerous clients who had employees embezzling but had not worked with money laundering since she graduated. Interest sparked, she set her coffee cup to the side, leaning forward. “Tell me more!”
Nancy laughed and shook her head. “I just knew this would continue to capture your attention.” She flipped through several papers in the file on her desk and said, “Okay, here’s what Sally thinks. One of Errol’s good friends owns the Smoky Casino and Resort right over the state line in North Carolina, at the edge of the reservation. Up until she found out about Errol’s extracurricular activities, the only vice she knew of was he occasionally gambled. But he claimed he never gambled much and told her it was just to support his friend. It didn’t appear to be an addiction and since he won as often as he lost, she wasn’t concerned. But, when she started looking a little bit harder at the business accounts, she thinks he may be laundering money through the casino to keep it from showing up on the business books. That way, he’s not having to pay taxes on it, not having to report it to the IRS, therefore she never sees it. So, if they split their finances in a divorce, there’s a ton of money he has hidden that she would never get.”
“Can’t she go to the authorities with her suspicions? Since his business is in Tennessee and he’s possibly laundering money in North Carolina, the FBI could be involved.”
Nancy’s hair swished over her shoulders as she shook her head. “She’s not interested in that. At least not until she has more evidence.” With palms facing upward, she sighed. “Sally knows that if her husband’s been doing something illegal, with her name on the business papers it could look as though she’s been part of the money laundering or complicit. All of their assets could be frozen, and she can still walk out of the divorce with nothing. She doesn’t want to be part of any illegal activities, but she refuses to let him hide away some of their shared assets. She needs to know what she’s up against. She needs someone to look over the books, find out what is legally coming in and what might be illegally flying under the IRS’ radar.”
Her mind already racing with ideas, she nodded. “I can understand that. So, you’d like me to look over the business books and give her an idea if and how much money is being skimmed off, right?”
Nancy nodded with enthusiasm. “That’s exactly what she wants.”
“Well, if she wants to get the financial reports to you, then I’ll take a look at them. It will be unofficial, of course, but at least I can point her in the right direction. She can hire my firm to—”