Page 13 of Working for the Heiress

The page on top was a requisition from fourteen months ago. C. Holt, Lead Mechanic. The familiar small flourish on the C. He was requesting components for the fleet's annual deep maintenance cycle — a long list, item by item, part numbers I didn't know but could look up, quantities and grades and vendors he'd recommended.

I'd already pulled the Boston response on my laptop last night. Approved. Allocated. The full dollar figure, line by line, signed off in the corporate office of Ashford Aviation by a name I didn't recognize.

What I had not seen until thirty minutes ago, when I'd come into the file room and started pulling the regional purchasing records, was what had actually been ordered.

I opened the folder.

The receiving log was on top, dated the week after Boston's approval. Roughly sixty percent of Holt's list had been ordered. Several of the high-cost components had been substituted. A couple had simply been dropped. The substitutions were not noted as substitutions. They were noted as the original line items, with the lower-cost part numbers written in.

I flipped to the next page. The previous year's deep maintenance cycle, same pattern. The year before, same.

I sat at the table with the folder in front of me and felt icy dread crackling through my chest.

I knew just enough about helicopters from my secret flying lessons to realize this looked very unscrupulous. But I didn’t know whether substitutions like this were … I couldn’t even allow my mind to name the frightening words hovering in the shadows.

But I needed to know if Holt knew this was going on.

I left the file room and walked down the office hallway and pushed open the side door into the cold morning, and crossed the asphalt toward the hangar with the folder against my ribs.

The hangar door was open and the space was mostly empty. Not entirely, though.

He was at the engine of one of the birds, his back to me. The henley was navy this morning. His shoulders did not turn when I came in.

"Holt."

He turned, his eyes flaring for a second before he was able to control his features into something more professional. “Ms. Ashford.”

I set the folder down on the workbench next to him.

"I have a question about a parts requisition," I said.

I had practiced the sentence on the walk over. It came out level, professional, the regional operations manager doing her job. He looked at the folder. Then he looked at me.

"All right," he said, but his face had lost a little of the hard resolve.

"This is the deep maintenance cycle." I opened the folder to his requisition. "This is what you ordered."

He looked at it.

"This is what Boston approved." I tapped another form.

He frowned. “All right."

"This" — I turned the page — "is what the operation received."

He looked at the receiving log.

He didn't say anything for a long moment. He picked up the page. He held it under the work light. He went down the list with one finger, slowly, and at three places his finger stopped and I watched the pulse tick in his neck, his jaw tighten.

He put the page back on the bench.

"Where did you get this?" he said.

"From the file room. The regional archives."

"Who else has seen it?"

"No one."