faint strains of music coming from inside, doing my best not to think about how my love life had gone from zero to sixty—and back to zero—in nothing flat that night.
“What are you doing out here?”
My eyes snapped open, and I found Bree and Alice standing before me, all clean and pressed and ready for a dance.
“Me? What about you?”
“Your friendly neighborhood Cinderellas have finished the housework and are ready to get their dance on,” Bree replied.
I chuckled, but my heart wasn’t in it.
“Can I borrow Alice for a minute or two?”
Bree gave me the stink-eye. “Are you going to get my child into more trouble?”
“I don’t think so,” I said hopefully.
“I’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep Aunt Tally safe.”
“Okay. I’m going in to that dance to find some rich, handsome cowboy. But I’ve got my phone. Just buzz if you get in a pickle.”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Tell Marla and Rosemary Gunderson that I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I just needed to check something out across campus.”
I took Alice by the hand and led her across the moonlit campus toward Sinclair Hall. “You still have Emily’s keys, right?”
Alice nodded. “Are we breaking in?”
“No. Well, yes. But just to borrow her computer. We need to search the Internet for something.”
We let ourselves into Emily’s office, and Alice booted up the computer.
“What are we looking for?”
“Two words: q-u-i t-a-m.”
She glanced up at me, her eyes wide with surprise, but then typed in the words.
“The very first result is for something called a qui tam action.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“Um . . .” She clicked open a link and read to herself for a moment. “It looks like it’s a type of lawsuit where an individual person sues on behalf of the government. So, like, if you found out that someone was cheating the government by, like, charging the military too much for fighter jets, you could file a lawsuit representing the interest of the government.”
She studied the screen some more, then uttered a short, mirthless laugh.
“Apparently the government wants to pay people to narc. So if you bring one of these lawsuits, you get a cut of whatever the government recovers. Like fifteen to twenty-five percent. And your attorney fees.”
“Attorney fees?” I had a sudden thought. “Can you do a search for this type of lawsuit and ‘attorneys’ and ‘Dalliance, Texas’?”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Huh,” Alice said. “It looks like there’s a directory of lawyers in Texas who handle these types of cases. And there’s only one listing in Dalliance: Jackson and Ver Steeg.”
“Oh.” I sagged against Emily’s desk and closed my eyes. “Oh, my.”
“What?” Alice asked.
Silence stretched between us, and I could almost hear the wheel click in her giant brain as she made the same realization I had.
“The difference between the two spreadsheets,” she said. “It wasn’t just a math error.”
“No. Gunderson must have monkeyed with the spreadsheet template to calculate the facilities and administration charge using a slightly higher percentage. It padded all the grant requests by a bit, which he could then skim off the top. That’s why Bryan told Ashley that fractions of percents mattered.”
Alice whistled. “With Emily’s grant, a fraction of a percent wouldn’t amount to much, but for the hard sciences, those grants can be millions of dollars. Just half a percent of that is thousands of dollars.”
“Bryan figured it out. And he decided to cash in, to file one of these qui tam actions. Probably because of the baby.”
“But how would Gunderson have known?”
“Bryan’s lawyer is Kristen Ver Steeg. Her partner is Madeline Jackson, who is Rosemary Gunderson’s niece. I’m guessing Madeline Jackson said something to the Gundersons.”
“She did.”
Alice and I both yelped. We hadn’t heard George Gunderson approach, and now he stood between us and the door. And he had a gun in his hand.
“She didn’t mean to betray Bryan’s confidentiality. She simply thanked us for referring Bryan to the firm and mentioned that he was considering a qui tam action, which could prove lucrative for the firm. It never occurred to her that I was involved in the fraud Bryan planned to expose.”
George stepped further into Emily’s office and shut the door behind him.
“It seems I misjudged you, Ms. Jones,” he said. “I rather thought I might get caught, but not by you.”
Was that a compliment? An insult? Did it really matter when I was clearly about to die?
“May I ask what gave me away?”
Fine. If the man wanted to play this