Chương 5
“I was home.”
“You live where?”
“Brooklyn Heights.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone who can confirm?”
She gave him a bitter laugh.
“My building has cameras. Does loneliness count as an alibi if there’s video?”
“It counts as video.”
“I was asleep.”
“Who had your keycard?”
“No one.”
“Your purse?”
“With me.”
“Spare?”
“No.”
“Old credential?”
She stopped.
Luca waited.
“What?”
“A year ago,” she said slowly, “the gallery changed access systems.”
“And?”
“They issued new cards. We were supposed to return the old ones.”
“Did you?”
“I gave mine to Marcus’s assistant with a stack from the executive team.”
Luca looked back at the logs.
The identifier belonged to the old card.
A credential that should have been destroyed.
Allison sat down.
For the first time that night, she looked less frightened than ashamed.
“He kept everything.”
“Maybe.”
“Old security card. Old hardware key.”
“Maybe.”
“Why would anyone reactivate them?”
“We’ll find out.”
“You already know.”
“No.”
She pressed her palms against her eyes.
“I spent two weeks wondering if I had approved something and forgotten.”
Luca said nothing.
“I started checking medication side effects.”
He looked at her.
“What medication?”
“Sleep aid. Occasionally.”
“Could you have been impaired?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You just said—”
“I said I was scared enough to wonder.”
Her voice broke on the last word, but she recovered quickly.
She looked toward the blinds.
“I kept waking up at four in the morning and opening the accounting app on my phone even though I knew it wouldn’t tell me anything. I checked sent email. Deleted email. Calendar. Rideshare history. Credit cards. I started wondering if there was some version of my life I had participated in and didn’t remember.”
Luca lowered his voice.
“That happens when records contradict memory.”
“You say that like you’ve seen it before.”
“I have.”
“Were they guilty?”
“Sometimes.”
“And the others?”
“Sometimes records are wrong.”
The printer started again behind them.
Allison laughed weakly.
“Beautiful speech.”
“I’m working on it.”
At 3:38 a.m., Luca found the administrator who had reactivated Allison’s old hardware key.
Denise Harper, finance operations manager.
Allison frowned.
“Denise wouldn’t do this for Marcus.”
“You know that?”
“I’ve known her twelve years.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“She hates Marcus.”
“Also not the same thing.”
“Call her.”
“At three forty in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because if she’s involved, we alert her.”
“And if she isn’t?”
“We ruin her sleep later.”
Allison swore at him.
He approved the sentiment.
They kept working.
At 4:02, they found something neither expected.
One handwritten entry in the blue ledger did not match the others.
The ink was darker.
The handwriting was different.
Allison’s face emptied.
Luca magnified the scan.
The line recorded a vendor invoice adjustment from the previous year.
Date changed: June 30 to June 28.
Initials: A.R.
He looked at Allison.
She stared at the floor.
“You wrote this.”
“Yes.”
The word barely came out.
Luca pushed his chair back.
“What did you change?”
“Invoice date.”
“Why?”
She did not answer.
“Allison.”
“We had a donor restriction.”
“What kind?”
“A grant had to be committed by the end of the fiscal quarter or part of it reverted.”
“So you backdated an invoice.”
“Two days.”
“That’s fraud.”
“I know what it is.”
“Do you?”
Her head snapped up.
“Yes.”
For the first time, anger overcame fear.
“I know exactly what I did.”
Luca stood.
He suddenly needed distance from the desk.
“You told me you had never altered financial records.”
“I told you I didn’t steal money.”
“That’s not what I asked you in the interview.”
“I know.”
“You lied.”
“Yes.”
He stared at her.
The office seemed smaller than it had ten minutes earlier.
Outside, the rain had weakened. Water moved in irregular threads down the window.
“Why?”
Allison’s voice became flat.
“Because Marcus told me to.”
Luca laughed once, without humor.
“Of course.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“You hid misconduct, and now the same person you accuse of framing you conveniently ordered it?”
“It happened.”
“And you didn’t mention it because?”
“Because I would look exactly how I look right now.”
“Unreliable?”
“Guilty.”
“You were guilty of something.”
“Yes.”
“Something financially relevant.”
“Yes.”
“Something involving Marcus.”
“Yes.”
“And you decided I didn’t need to know.”
“I decided I didn’t want you to know.”
The correction mattered.
Luca looked at her.
She seemed tired enough to collapse, but she did not defend herself further.
“What happened?” he asked.
Allison sat on the filing cabinet.
“It was an invoice for art storage. The service happened. The amount was correct. The donor commitment deadline was June thirtieth. Accounts payable missed the paperwork because the finance director was out after surgery.”
“So you changed the invoice date.”
“Marcus said the board would lose two hundred thousand dollars in restricted funds because of an administrative timing problem.”
“And you agreed.”
“I said no.”
“But you did it.”
“The next morning.”
“Why?”
“Because he told me six education employees would lose their jobs if the money reverted.”
Luca rubbed his face.
“Would they have?”
“I don’t know.”
“There it is.”
“I know.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.”
“Did you call counsel?”
“No.”
“Finance committee?”
“No.”
“No one.”
“No one.”
He turned away.
Years ago, he had believed guilt separated people cleanly into groups.
People who falsified things.
People who didn’t.
Life had been less cooperative.
“You changed the date yourself?”
“Yes.”
“On paper?”
“Yes.”
“Then entered the revision?”
“I asked Denise to update the system.”
“Did she know why?”
“I told her we had the wrong invoice date.”
“Was that true?”
“No.”
“Did Marcus document the instruction?”
“No.”
“Email?”
“No.”
“Text?”
“No.”
“He just told you.”
“In his office.”
Luca looked at the blue ledger.
“And someone recorded it here.”
“Yes.”
“Who keeps this ledger?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know it existed?”
“No.”
“Then how did your backdated invoice get into it?”
Allison looked at him.
May you like
That was the question that changed the room.
If the ledger was Marcus’s secret record, why preserve evidence of a relatively small falsification he had supposedly ordered Allison to make?
