Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The bridge off Grimm Island always felt like crossing a border. One side, the soft enclosed world of live oaks and salt air and people who’d known your grandmother. The other side, the mainland, where the world was wider and less forgiving and nobody knew your business unless you told them.
Dash drove with one elbow propped on the door and his sunglasses on. Off duty suited him. The set of his shoulders was different, looser, and I tried not to find that as appealing as I did.
“Deidre tracked down Henry’s housekeeper last night,” I said, mostly to get my mind onto something useful. “Lila Mae Banks. She’s the one who found him. She’s in her eighties now, living with her daughter out in Arizona.”
“She willing to talk?”
“Deidre called the daughter to ask and got a polite brush-off. But she called back an hour later and said her mother would do a video call. Wednesday morning.”
Dash glanced over. “What changed her mind?”
“Hard to say.” I watched a pelican work the shallows below the bridge in a slow, patient arc through the passenger window. “Maybe she’s been waiting twenty-five years for someone to ask.”
“We’ll find out Wednesday,” he said.
The road opened up once we cleared the bridge and headed north toward the peninsula. Mount Pleasant spread out around us, unhurried and sure of itself, old money with nothing to prove and no interest in proving it.
Winston Malone’s address took us off the main road and into a neighborhood of older clapboard homes set back from the street, where the trees had been growing long enough to arch over the road and meet in the middle.
His house was pale yellow with white shutters and a crape myrtle out front that someone had never butchered into a ball, which I took as a good sign about the man’s character.
Dash pulled to the curb. We sat a moment.
“What do we know about him?” he asked.
“James said he was sharp. Numbers man. Called him gifted.” I thought about the appointment book, the Monday meeting Henry had never kept. “He had a meeting scheduled with Henry for the week after Henry died.”
We got out into the thick morning heat.
The man who answered the door was somewhere in his mid-seventies, trim and upright.
He’d lost most of his hair and wore what was left combed carefully to one side, and his wire-rimmed glasses were the same style he’d probably worn for forty years.
He had on pressed khakis and leather loafers, even on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be, which told me something about who he was.
“Mrs. McCoy,” he said, and his gaze moved to Dash, assessing. “Sheriff Beckett.”
“Thank you for seeing us,” I said. “James Everett sends his regards.”
Something eased in his face at that. “Come in out of the heat.”
The inside of the house was tidy without being fussy. Bookshelves along one wall, a leather chair positioned for the best light, a small collection of framed photographs on the mantle. No clutter, but not empty either.
He directed us to the sitting room and excused himself to get the coffee he’d had brewing. The room was quiet enough that I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. Dash sat on the sofa and I took the chair beside him.
Winston came back with three mugs on a tray and set them on the low table between us without ceremony. He poured, pushed the cream and sugar forward, and sat in the leather chair across from us.
“You’re investigating Henry’s death,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“We believe it was a homicide,” Dash said.
Winston wrapped both hands around his mug. “I’ve believed that since the morning they found him. I just didn’t have anyone to say it to.”
“Tell me about the foundation,” I said. “James gave us some of the history. How long had you been with them when Henry died?”
“Twelve years.” No hesitation. “I came on in 1987. They’d been running it on goodwill and a prayer up to that point.
Henry and James were brilliant doctors, and Henry had this vision that could fill a room.
But they needed someone who understood what it actually took to run an organization that size. So they brought me in.”
“You were their numbers man,” I said.
He almost smiled. “I was. The foundation was growing faster than they could manage. We were in eight countries by the time I arrived. By 1995 we were in twenty-two.” He lifted his mug.
“The money moved the same way. Donors from all over. Private, corporate, a few government grants from partner countries. It required a very careful hand.”
“And you were that hand,” Dash said.
“I tried to be.” He set the mug down. “For a long time, I thought I was.”
I watched his face when he said it. Not guilt. Disappointment, maybe.
“When did you first notice something was wrong?” I asked.
“September of that year. Just weeks before he died. Supply orders that were slightly higher than they should have been for a given clinic. Shipping invoices that didn’t match what I had on file. It was designed to be hard to find.”
“How long had it been going on when you found it?”
“Hard to say. Could have been a year. Could have been longer. Whoever did it was patient about it. The amounts weren’t large individually.
A few hundred dollars here, a few hundred there.
Scattered across different operations in different countries.
If you looked at any single piece of it, you could explain it away.
A supply chain hiccup in Haiti. A currency conversion issue in Moldova.
” He leaned forward slightly. “But I didn’t look at individual pieces.
I looked at the whole, and the whole didn’t balance.
We were moving around two hundred and fifty million dollars a year at that point.
A million dollars missing across that kind of operation is easy to miss. Someone knew that.”
“Who had that kind of access?” Dash asked.
Winston set his mug down. “That’s what kept me up at night.
It wasn’t a long list. Myself. Henry. James.
We had a small executive staff—an operations director, a grants coordinator, and a logistics manager who oversaw the overseas supply chains.
And the board.” He paused. “Twelve members. They didn’t have direct access to the accounts, but they had account numbers and quarterly reports.
Anyone sharp enough could have found the seams if they knew what they were looking for. ”
“So we’re talking six people at most who had real access,” I said. “You, Henry, James, and the three on your executive staff. And then the board, which would add ten more since Henry and James were also board members.”
“Correct. And realistically, to move money the way it was being moved, you’d need to understand the reporting structure from the inside. This was pre 9/11, so bank regulations weren’t as strict.” He picked up his mug.
“How did Henry take the news?” I asked.
“I went to him in person. Drove over to his house one evening and laid it all out. He didn’t even get the chance to invite me in off his front porch before I was telling him everything I found.
” He looked at his hands. “I wasn’t calm about it.
I was understandably upset. It was my reputation at stake, and honestly, I was embarrassed I hadn’t caught it sooner.
I raised my voice. I’m not proud of that. ”
“What did he do?”
“Just stood there and listened. The more he didn’t react the more worked up I got.
” He paused. “When I finally ran out of steam he was quiet a long time. He wasn’t angry at me.
He just didn’t want to believe it. Henry had built that foundation on the idea that people were fundamentally good, that if you gave them meaningful work and a mission worth believing in, they’d rise to it.
The thought that someone entrenched in all of it, someone he’d trusted, had been quietly stealing from sick children in those clinics.
” He shook his head. “It broke something in him. I could see it.”
“What did you drive back then?” I asked.
He looked up, mildly surprised by the shift. “A Cadillac. Navy blue.” He paused. “Why?”
“Just filling some missing pieces,” I said.
“He asked me to give him a little time before we brought anyone else in. Said he needed to be sure. I told him I’d give him whatever he needed to find out who it was.”
“You never found out who it was?” Dash asked.
“Henry said if we were going to accuse anyone we needed to be certain, because a wrong accusation in an organization that size would destroy everything he’d built.
” Winston set the mug down and pushed it away slightly.
“So he agreed to a forensic audit. An outside firm, no connection to the foundation, would be brought in to go through every account and every transaction.”
The sitting room was quiet except for the hum of the air-conditioning and the distant sound of a lawn mower two streets over.
“We were going to set the whole thing in motion that Monday,” he said. “Henry wanted to tell the board himself. He wanted to be the one to look them in the eye and say we have a problem and we are fixing it. That was Henry. He never sent anyone else to do the hard thing.”
“He died on Saturday before your meeting,” Dash said.
Winston was quiet for a moment. “I got the news Sunday. James called me.” He looked at the floor.
“Did the audit ever happen?” Dash asked.