crimes tended to crop up often enough in our line of work, but the hiring of prostitutes was a new one.
While technically prostitution counted as a class B misdemeanor and offering prostitution services counted as a class A misdemeanor, the invoices didn’t indicate the age of the prostitutes, in which case the employee—and possibly the company—could face a class E felony.
Ugh. I remembered way too much about the various sexually oriented crimes that a company could get dinged with if their employees developed certain tastes. Assuming I escaped from my current assignment unscathed, I’d take the time to do something fun, such as enjoy evening strolls with my dog. I’d have to see if I could train the kitten to walk with my dog, as I didn’t want Edgar Allan Paw to have to deal with separation from his best friend again.
“I’d say I’m sorry I found that, but I’m really not. I suspect Miss Meltrew may have bailed while she could, understanding there’d be trouble around the corner. These invoices were in the pile that hadn’t reached her collection of assistants. They don’t have any of the notations her assistants used when checking them, nor were they registered in their spreadsheet yet. I was inputting them into the system for auditing when I noticed the line items.”
“Who is stupid enough and audacious enough to openly write that the invoices are for prostitutes? They even used their stage names on the invoice.” Garret groaned and flopped onto my couch. “This is a nightmare. How are Edgar Allan Paw and Lenore settling in?”
“They seem okay so far. Neither hate me, and I’ll take that. I’m seriously considering taking my lunch break to look into buying them a lot of toys and things for the apartment. I’ll need a bed for them, as I don’t want his old bones having to deal with the hardwood floor, but they’re heated in the new apartment, so maybe that’ll be good for him. As for the nightmare, it isn’t all bad. The accounting itself, except for this one individual’s illicit acquisitions, seems to be mostly in order. I don’t know why this person thought it was okay to use company accounts to make these purchases.”
“To pass guilt to the company in revenge? This is going to cause them a lot of problems.”
If the employee took the fall rather than the company, it would create some scandal and some news, but I doubted it would do much damage to them—assuming they did a good job mitigating the fallout. “Well, their accounting will be sorted otherwise. If you hear me laughing later, it’s because I’m working through the varying stages of acceptance about this job. I now understand why the other accountants ran away.”
“Yeah. Every now and then, we get something weird. I hadn’t expected the weirdness to spread, though.”
“I guess the marketer decided if Miss Meltrew could hire prostitutes, so could he.”
“That’s a frighteningly plausible thought. You deserve lunch for putting up with that. How does pizza sound?”
“Pizza sounds good. I’m just going to hope I don’t find anything else unique in these invoices. I did check through all of that one’s outstanding invoices, so it would be for a new marketer if something crops up.”
“Hopefully without literal crops.”
I snickered. “Hopefully not. If I do find any invoices for literal crops, I will hope there’s an associated employee perks party involving a stable. Riding crops could be justified in that case.”
“Hell, if that marketer had been smart, he would have disguised his prostitutes as rides at a local stable for client enrichment.”
Huh. My boss had a good point; that would be a decent way to hide illegal activities, especially if the marketing department did enrichment activities with their advertising firms often. “Don’t give any marketers bad ideas, Garret. I might have been caught by that one. It’s not unreasonable for companies to do weird things like that to build corporate relationships.”
“I have an entire list of weird things we’ve found that were used to hide illegal activities. No one has actually used the stable idea yet, though. But after one of the accountants pitched it during a brainstorm, we’re all on the lookout for oddball invoices that might be hiding illegal activities.”
“When I became an accountant, I never believed there’d be so many unique perils associated with my job.”
“Well, you’ll appreciate the McCarthy file. It’s fairly normal, although there are a lot of medical receipts that need to be checked over. Honestly, I don’t think you’ll