Part 13
“No.”
“Did you?”
Edwin’s face tightened.
He had spoken Lena’s name during a phone call at the cottage, instructing Mrs. Hargrove to issue the replacement apron.
Someone had recorded hours of conversation and assembled what they needed.
“Who had access to the laboratory system?” Celeste asked.
“Owen,” Edwin said. “Miriam. Your aunt.”
Beatrice, seated across the table, gave him a look of contempt. “I visited once.”
“Once is access,” Rusk said.
Celeste studied her aunt.
Beatrice did not chew gum. She wrote with her right hand. She had been with Adrian during the attack, though an alibi shared by two compromised people was hardly clean.
“What happened in the corridor when you met Miriam?” Celeste asked.
“I told you.”
“You told me what she wanted. Not what you said.”
Beatrice glanced toward Rusk.
“Answer her,” he said.
Beatrice straightened. “Miriam claimed Northlight was using shell clinics to purchase precursor chemicals. She believed someone within the foundation was funding a private laboratory.”
“Who?”
“She suspected Edwin.”
Edwin laughed weakly over the monitor. “Naturally.”
“What did you think?” Celeste asked.
“I thought Edwin might be moving money to expose the operation.”
“Why not tell me?”
Beatrice’s patience cracked. “Because you were planning an auction gala while the foundation’s accounts were bleeding. Because every serious conversation with you had to be scheduled between interviews and donor dinners. Because when I told you the board was worried about unauthorized spending, you said Edwin had it handled.”
Celeste remembered the exchange. She had said those exact words while choosing flowers.
“I was wrong,” she said.
“Yes.”
The lack of comfort felt deserved.
Rusk turned to Beatrice. “Did Dr. Saye provide evidence?”
“A sample invoice and a laboratory address.”
“Where?”
“An industrial park outside Providence.”
“Did you investigate?”
“I gave it to Owen.”
Edwin’s eyes opened sharply on the monitor. “You what?”
“He was head of security.”
“He was investigating for me.”
“Then he had every opportunity to compare information.”
“Or erase it,” Rusk said.
A raid on the Providence address found an empty laboratory.
The space had been professionally cleaned within the previous forty-eight hours. Chemical storage cabinets remained, along with residue consistent with AM-47 production. Security footage from neighboring businesses showed a refrigerated delivery truck leaving at two in the morning after Edwin’s attack.
The truck belonged to a medical waste contractor partly owned by Northlight.
Its driver was found dead in a motel room from an apparent overdose.
The investigation changed shape.
It was no longer only about Edwin.
Federal agents arrived. The foundation’s accounts were frozen. Grant payments stalled. Clinics called asking whether salaries would clear. A housing program in Baltimore delayed closing on an apartment building because the promised funds could not transfer.
Modern consequences appeared not as dramatic confrontations but as emails, payroll warnings, and frightened voices on conference calls.
Celeste spent twelve hours at the foundation office answering questions she should have asked years earlier.
One program director said, “We have forty-two families moving next week. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That isn’t acceptable.”
“No,” Celeste said. “It isn’t.”
For the first time, she read every invoice placed in front of her.
Most were legitimate. Some were sloppy. Seven contained vendor codes connected to Northlight. Two had been approved from Celeste’s account while she was overseas, though travel records showed her laptop remained in New York.
Someone inside the foundation office had access.
The audit logs identified Celeste’s executive assistant, Mara Venn.
Mara had worked for her for six years.
She was efficient, quiet, and so skilled at anticipating Celeste’s preferences that Celeste rarely needed to complete a request.
When federal agents entered the office, Mara was at her desk correcting a donor list.
She did not run.
She did not ask why they were there.
She simply removed her glasses and placed them beside the keyboard.
Celeste watched from the conference room doorway.
“Mara?”
Mara looked at her.
“You used my credentials.”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer shocked everyone.
“Why?”
“My attorney advised me not to discuss that.”
“Did you work with Owen?”
Mara looked toward the agents.
Celeste stepped closer. “Did you attack Edwin?”
“No.”
“Did you help someone attack him?”
Mara’s eyes filled, but her voice stayed level. “I moved money. I altered records. I did not agree to hurt anyone.”
“Who did?”
Her attorney arrived before she answered.
Mara was charged with wire fraud, identity theft, conspiracy, and obstruction. She agreed to a proffer session the next morning, hoping to reduce her sentence.
Her account revealed the structure.
Northlight had been revived four years earlier by Owen Price and a former Asterion chemist. They used foundation vendors to divert small percentages from large grants. The money funded a private laboratory producing AM-47 derivatives for overseas buyers who wanted fast-acting restraint drugs.
Mara had joined after Owen threatened to expose falsified expenses from Celeste’s office. The expenses were not personal theft; they were donor gifts and travel costs deliberately categorized to avoid board scrutiny. Still improper. Still enough to end Mara’s career.
She told herself she was moving numbers, not harming patients.
Then the amounts grew.
Edwin discovered the duplicate invoices. Instead of reporting them, he began diverting Northlight’s payments into his own controlled accounts, intending to force the conspirators into revealing themselves. Owen pretended to help him investigate while monitoring what he knew.
Mara planted the burner phone in Lena’s apron at Owen’s instruction.
“Why Lena?” Celeste asked during the recorded interview.
Mara looked at her through the glass partition.
“Because Edwin had already accused her,” she said. “Owen said no one would look twice.”
Celeste’s stomach turned.
“Who wore the raincoat?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said Owen planned the attack.”
“He planned to take the ledger. He said Edwin would be sedated.”
“Who administered the drug?”
Mara rubbed her palms together. “He never told me.”
“Where is Owen?”
May you like
“I don’t know.”
She was lying about something. Celeste could see it in the way Mara’s gaze shifted toward the observation room whenever his name was spoken.
