Chapter 18 #2
He tapped the file folder he held. “I’ve been going through every subcontractor recommendation Vance has made. Every single one traces back to the three companies I mentioned. And I know you say he has preferred vendors, but…this is what I’ve been working on.”
He grabbed his laptop and brought it to her desk, opening it to an internet search. In a flash, he clicked through a link with remarkable left-handed dexterity.
“Look,” he said softly, the seriousness in his dark eyes making her breath catch. “They’re all registered to the same address. A commercial mailbox suite in Fort Walton Beach. Same registered agent on all three filings. I pulled it from the county clerk’s website.”
She stared at him. Then she pulled his laptop closer and began reading.
“When did you do this?”
“When I’m bored.”
She gave a dry laugh. “Do I not give you enough to do?”
He leaned back. “Can I be honest?”
“Please.”
“I talked to my dad.”
“The investigator,” she said with a smile.
“He’s been tracking criminals for most of my life,” he said. “We talk cases and leads all the time, so I told him about this and…” He jutted his chin toward the door in the general direction of Vance-land. “The creep.”
She snorted at the term. “And what did he say?”
“He said…follow the stink. It always leads to the dead body. So I started digging into the subs.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp. “Please tell me no one’s buried under one of those lots.”
“Doubtful, but Vance Brennan could be—likely is—robbing Pippin Development Group blind.”
“What? How?”
“With the help of some second-rate sub that he’s probably scammed with before. There’s nothing about Brennan on the internet and Pippin hired him for this project.”
“What else did you find?” she asked, a little horrified.
“I stopped to go to PT, but you want to dig with me?”
For the next hour, they sat side by side at her desk, close enough that they frequently touched—which she was not thinking about—tracing the pattern that Connor had been watching take shape for weeks.
Every change order. Every contractor recommendation. Every time Vance had steered work away from the approved vendor list and toward his three pet companies.
Only twice had he let the job go to another company, and they were both for invoices under two grand. The big ones were all going to his “preferred vendors.”
The picture that emerged was methodical and damning. Vance wasn’t just recommending vendors he liked. He was funneling work to connected companies that were bidding just under budget—which meant someone was feeding them internal numbers before the request for bids went out.
And the only person with access to both the budget allocations and the contractor pipeline was Vance Brennan.
“The HVAC specs,” Meredith said suddenly, sitting up straight.
“What about them?”
“In the Alastair, I spec’d twenty-gauge galvanized steel ductwork for all Phase One residences. It’s in the architectural plans, the mechanical drawings, everything. But if Bayside Mechanical is cutting corners to pad margins…” She stood. “We need to go look at the model.”
“Now?”
“Right now. If the ductwork in the Alastair is a different gauge than what I specified—if they installed something cheaper and billed for what was on the plans—that’s not just fraud. That’s a building code violation. And it’s my name on those blueprints.”
Connor stood up. “Let’s go.”
The Alastair model sat at the front of Lakeside’s Phase One, its frame rising against a sky that was shifting from gold to copper as the sun dropped toward the tree line.
The construction crew had left, so the site was quiet—no trucks, no compressors, no shouted instructions over the whine of power tools. Just the skeletons of a few houses, and some foundations, all surrounded by red dirt and the beginnings of what would someday be a street.
Meredith ducked under the caution tape at the front entrance—there was no door yet, just a framed opening—and stepped onto the plywood subfloor.
The house smelled like fresh lumber and concrete and the faint chemical tang of drywall compound.
Sheets of drywall were stacked against the far wall, airing out.
Electrical wires hung from the ceiling joists like loose threads, and PVC plumbing stubs jutted from the slab in the kitchen and bathrooms.
And overhead, running between the roof trusses—the ductwork.
Connor followed her in. “What are we looking for?”
“Gauge markings.” She pointed at the nearest run of silver ductwork. “Should be stamped on the metal. Twenty-gauge galvanized will say 20 GA somewhere on the surface. You might have to feel for it.”
Connor grabbed a stepladder the crew had left behind, positioned it under the main trunk line, and climbed up. The light was fading, so he used his phone flashlight in one hand, running the beam along the surface of the duct.
“Got it,” he said, bending a little to see the awkward placement of the stamp. “Twenty-four gauge,” he read. “Higher than twenty. Is that—”
“Not good,” she said on a grunt. “The higher the number, the thinner the metal. That’s four gauges lighter than what I specified. Thinner metal, cheaper material, less durable. In a hurricane zone? The difference matters.”
He climbed down and looked at her. “They installed cheaper ductwork and they’re billing Pippin Lake for the more expensive level. That’s the margin. That’s where the money goes, as long as he has the sub in his pocket—all the subs. Bayside, Hawke, all the hand-picked Vance favorites.”
“We think,” she corrected. “We suspect. That’s not enough to accuse.”
Connor was quiet as he put the stepladder back in place. “So we have the bid pattern, the shared addresses, and now a physical discrepancy between specs and installation.”
“We’re at ninety percent,” she said.
“I’d say ninety-five.”
“That’s not a hundred.”
“Meredith.” He gave her a look. “When in your life has anything been a hundred percent certain?”
“My Revit calculations. My permit applications. My—”
“Your professional certainty is noted and admired. I meant in life.”
She propped against the stack of drywall sheets and looked around at the framed rough lumber and open sky—no walls, no finishes, just the bones of something that would someday be beautiful. Wires and ducts and PVC and a pile of drywall—the most unromantic setting imaginable.
And Connor McCarthy standing in the middle of it, looking at her with concern, determination, and the most gorgeous brown eyes she’d ever seen.
“We need to build the case,” she said, because it was easier than saying what she was actually thinking. “We’ll go through every invoice. Document the gauge discrepancy. Cross-reference the billing against the specs for every house where these contractors have done work.”
“I can do that,” he said without a second’s hesitation. “I can’t believe Vance wouldn’t expect us to catch him.”
“Us? Kiddo and her one-armed dental student sidekick?”
He laughed at that. “He underestimated us.”
“So bad. How long will it take to pull all the numbers, bids, and proof?” she asked.
“Maybe a week? We’ll have to fly under Vance’s radar, maybe work at night.”
She didn’t hate that idea, but just nodded, considering the schedule and what they were getting themselves into. “We should think about how to present this,” she said.
“Publicly,” he replied. “So Vance can’t worm out of it. Greg Hollister called a quarterly update for next week. Wednesday, I think. That’s enough time for us and you can take out ol’ Vance in front of his boss.”
She winced. “I didn’t come here to wreck a guy’s life, but…”
“But Vance would have no such qualms…kiddo.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “But let’s not say anything to my dad yet. Let’s get to ninety-nine-point-nine percent certainty and present it to my big boss. He has to make the call on what to do with the information and when.”
“Knowing Eli? He’ll do whatever is the right thing.”
“Absolutely.” She sighed. “His moral compass is straight as an arrow, but this is a massive project and if we end up losing it? That would be a hard hit to Acacia. We’ve hired two more people in Atlanta, and they might have to be let go.
The stakes are high, Connor. We can’t mess up. We can’t be wrong.”
They both thought about that, walking side by side toward the wide-open back of the house. Standing in what would someday be a family’s beautiful lakeside lanai, they didn’t say a word.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she finally whispered.
“For following the stink?”
She smiled. “For being so much more than I expected. For being…” She rooted for the right word that didn’t give away her feelings, but everything would sound like flirting. “More.” She gave a smile at the weak description. “I guess I underestimated you, too.”
He turned to her and put a light hand on her shoulder, guiding her around to face him. “Where are we, Mer? I mean, percentage-wise.”
She gazed up at him, at the light on his strong features and the invitation in his eyes. “Eighty percent?” she said, lightly enough to keep it funny and not as serious as she felt right then.
“What do I need to get to…” He swallowed and pinned her with his gaze. “The first kiss?”
Her heart tumbled around helplessly.
“Ninety?” he guessed. “’Cause I could get you there pretty easily.”
So easily she didn’t want to think about it. “Ninety is…high. I don’t think you can get to ninety.”
“We’re already at eighty-five, Mer, and you know it.”
She laughed at the verbal game. “Yeah…but ninety percent certainty for a kiss.”
“Eighty-six?” He slid his hand from her shoulder to under her hair, making chills dance under his touch. “Eighty-seven?” He threaded his fingers in her hair and brought her a millimeter closer. “Eighty-eight?”
She tried to breathe—really worked at something that should be natural—but all the air was stuck in her lungs.
He leaned down, their faces mere inches apart. “Eighty-nine?”
She felt his breath on her lips.
“And ninety,” he whispered, closing the last bit of space so that their mouths finally touched.
The breathless, heady, intimate moment made her dizzy as she closed her eyes and kissed him back. A beautiful kiss. An innocent, sweet, so long overdue kiss.
He broke the contact but then pecked lightly again as if still hungry for more. “Confession? I’ve been at a hundred for a while.”
The admission cracked something inside of her—a wall, a fear, a doubt—and she lifted both arms around his neck and pulled him back to her. This kiss was more intense and tasted like spearmint and surrender in a half-built room that smelled like wood shavings and joint paste.
He made a sound of surprise that lasted about half a second before his good arm came around her waist and drew her against him, the two of them suspended for a few seconds that felt endless and wonderful.
When they eased apart, the last of the sunset was bleeding through the open trusses above them, painting the raw lumber in shades of pink and gold.
“A hundred,” she breathed on a sigh. “That’s…a lot.”
“You with me?” He stroked her jaw with his thumb.
She let her eyes close. “Getting there.”
He dropped his forehead against hers. “Then there’s only one thing to do.”
“What?” she asked, not sure how fast or how far he would take this.
“We build our case, kick Vance to the curb, save the day, and then…” He kissed her nose and lightly turned her face to the golden glow of the sky. “Ride off into the sunset together.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or melt into his arms, so she did both.