Harmony and I ate a lovely meal even though the chicken chowder might have burnt just a tad on the bottom. She filled me in on activities and the kids’ schoolwork and her husband Jeremy’s work. It was nice to relax and discuss happy events, and warm poppyseed bread just out of the oven capped off a productive day.
Before bed, I needed to check my email, and I also wanted to look up some information, so I wished Harmony a good night and retired to my bedroom with Mr. Tuttles ever-present at my side.
“What do you think, Tuttlesworth? Are there any clues in Angie’s personal mail?”
Angie’s email was from a different era: AOL dot com. She’d had the same personal email since I’d known her and never switched. I remember teasing her once about her email service being from the Late Cretaceous period, and she good-naturedly laughed at me. “It’s free and I have no reason to switch. It does still work, you know!”
For her password, I typed in Stormy.BadKitty.AOL - shoot! AOL only had three letters. Did she just go with three letters, or did she add one in? I decided to go for just the three letters: Stormy.BadKitty.AOL1
I was in.
I glanced through many emails, seeing a lot from me, a bunch from Harmony, and some from some guy named Justice. Intrigued, I opened one of them, and I was disappointed that somebody with a cool name like that was just her veterinarian letting her know the results of Stormy’s blood test (it was fine). Wow, though. A vet emailing Angie from his own account? I looked at the time. He had emailed this at 9 pm on a Thursday. That seemed unusual, but not in a criminal way. I wondered if he might have a crush on our girl. I also wondered if his office was taking new clients, as I now seemed to have a whole house full of pets, and he clearly had great customer service.
Literally, the only other things in Angie’s personal email were marketing emails from grocery stores, department stores, and things like online photo digitizing services or Starbucks Rewards, all of which had piled up considerably since Angie’s death.
I’m so sorry Angie, but you have a lot of Starbucks Rewards for somebody who used to lecture me about shopping local.
I sighed. Nothing there. I wondered if I could get into the online portal for the Board of Director’s portion of our HOA portal. At the very least, that could hold things like contracts with the exterminator or the pool guy or groundskeepers.
As a member of the HOA, I had a login for the management company’s portal that handled all of the homeowners’ accounts. Through the portal, we could pay our assessments and view the governing documents, minutes, and the first few pages of the monthly financials. I knew that board members had more access, though, that allowed them to be able to view contracts, invoices, and the full monthly financials that included a check ledger, a register of assessments collected, and a copy of every bill paid that month.
I hoped to find the extermination contract with Bugged Out. It could, perhaps, give insight into why he had visited Angie on the day of her murder, and I would also be able to compare it to what he would be sending me for my fake request for a proposal as soon as I received it. Before I met with Brady Strong, Bug Guy, I had set up a fake gmail account in the name of Pepper.Anderson.HOABoard@gmail.com so that he had a convincing email to send it to, using a VPN, of course, so that it was also not traceable. That was a layer of protection I probably hadn’t needed, but it was easy enough to do, so at the time, I figured, why not? And Peter Handsome Accountant Barlow had mentioned that comparing contracts would be beneficial to determine if there was anything fishy going on.
I logged into Angie’s HOA account with her email, and, since the name of our management company was Sea Side HOA Management, I tried Stormy.BadKitty.SEAS19 and was in. I was truly becoming a fan of Angie’s password system and vowed to begin applying something similar to my own accounts. I looked down at Tuttles, laying happily at my feet.
“How about it, Tuttle Bears? Should we have a password that’s Tuts.GoodDog?”
His little tail thumped and his black eyes reached, once again, into the depths of my soul, letting me know that, yes, he found that a very good idea indeed. I patted him on the head for always being there to help me.
It didn’t take long to find the contract with Bugged Out, and I found a clause for Sunhaven HOA to pay an extra $100 every time they were called to come out to take care of a wasp nest or any other infestation that was apart from their monthly contract. That seemed to me to be a lot of money, but, really, what did I know? It was also feasible that an HOA like ours had a lot of homeowners who would not put up with mice in the playground or wasps under a slide, so perhaps this was normal? I sighed. I’d have to wait until I received Brady’s quote before I could figure anything out.
A run-through of the financials revealed that on average, Brady came out to knock down a wasp’s next once per month during the summer and fall months. Again, I had no idea if this was normal.
I leaned back, rubbing my neck, my muscles sore from leaning over the computer so much.
Yawning, I decided to do a quick google of the ins and outs of kickbacks. As I’d told Peter, I’d never had to deal with anything like kickbacks. As far as I knew, every company I’d ever worked with was on the up and up, but now I was questioning everything. I stared at the large photo I’d had framed on the wall in my study of Mr. Tuttles cute little face. He always inspired me to think harder, be better.
To me, kickbacks were a simple matter of a contractor being paid for a job and then giving money back to somebody within the organization that hired them. As Peter Barlow mentioned, though, it could also involve kickbacks in the form of high-value gifts, such as tickets to a football game.
The Google told me that, legally speaking, a kickback is an illegal payment intended as compensation for preferential treatment and is a type of bribery. While kickbacks can take many forms, they all feature some sort of collusion between two parties, and it is a corrupt practice that interferes with the ability to make unbiased choices. In the case of our HOA, what it means is that the homeowners pay more money to a contractor compared to how much they should be paying, and the extra money is funneled to somebody. The most likely candidate for who that somebody would be Angie, Cynthia, or Felyne.
Clearly, Angie wasn’t taking any kickbacks. The most likely scenario in my mind was that Angie was on the verge of exposing corruption, which is why she was murdered. This meant any contractor involved in kickbacks with our HOA was suspect, along with anybody receiving them. Beatrice could also be a candidate. Even though she was the former President, if she had granted a contract that came with a little cash under the table for her, then she could easily still be collecting on it.
As our HOA manager, Felyne was the person who actually awarded the contracts and kept the records for them. Technically, the board members are the ones who decide who gets a contract, but it wouldn’t be that hard for Felyne to inflate a bid for any contractor she didn’t want to award a contract to, insuring that her favorite would be the one chosen.
Cynthia would be my next best suspect, not only because of her odd behavior at my house, but also, as Treasurer, she had her finger on the pulse of the HOA’s finances. She was also the person approving invoices submitted to the HOA, so she would be the most likely member of the board to realize that an invoice was inflated. Could she manipulate the board to award a contract to somebody giving her money under the table? Probably. I asked myself, though, if Cynthia was smart enough to do this. My first guess was, no, she was not, but she clearly was trying to get her new BFF a job, so why not?
I remembered the list of contractors on the slip of paper I found on Angie’s desk and took a photo of. Bringing that up on my phone, I copied them down again into my own notes.
Bugged Out - Exterminator
Max Howard - Pool
Palm Hills Turf and Tides - Grounds Contract & Irrigation
Handy Heroes - Maintenance
Andrew Geist - Law Firm
Hearst & Morgan - Tax and Audit Firm
Angie had an “x” by the grounds contractor, the law firm, the maintenance company, and the tax firm. It was a good guess that the law firm and accountants would not be involved in kickbacks, so I guessed Angie had ruled all four of them out as possibilities for fraud.
I went back online and took notes on the different invoices over many months. As I suspected, the invoices for the law firm, the tax accountant, and the maintenance contractor all looked straightforward, although I wasn’t sure I’d know if they were inflated or not.
The maintenance man, Ralph, had relatively few calls to fix normal things around the neighborhood, like light posts or signs. Nothing there rang any alarms.
Max Howard, Pool Guy, also had a regular contract, coming to adjust the chemicals in the pool once per week, clean the pool, clean the filter, do all the stuff that pool guys do, and he also had a clause in his contract that he would come out when requested at a certain hourly rate. Like the exterminator, he seemed to be called for the extra work quite a bit.
I supposed that if a child pooped in the pool, somebody would have to come out and shock the pool with chlorine before anybody could get back in, and I knew our neighborhood would not put up with a closed pool just because the pool contractor was hard to get ahold of. My neighbors, bless their hearts, were used to instantaneous service.
The same thing could be said about the exterminator, though. Yes, he seemed to come out frequently, but if there was a wasp nest under the slide on the playground, these neighbors would not be happy about it being left for more than a day, if that.
I did the math on my phone’s calculator. Say Bug Guy came out once per month for an extra $100 to take care of wasps, which, admittedly, we did have a problem with. What if he was called without there being a wasp nest, though. He could feasibly pocket $50 and either Felyne, Beatrice, or Cynthia could pocket $50. Fifty bucks per month didn’t seem like enough money to risk jail time for, though. Then again, I recalled Angie telling me that Felyne managed nine other HOA’s. What if all of Felyne’s HOA’s used Bugged Out, or, more specifically, Brady Strong, for their extermination needs, and what if each of them was called out for a $100 wasp visit once per month? That would add up to $500 per month extra as cash under the table. That kind of money, was nothing to sneeze at.
I changed into my pajamas and crawled into bed just in time for Stormy to jump up with her lithe grace to join us. I gave her a scratch under chin and pat on Mr. Tuttles’ head, and we all fell into a restful sleep.