Chapter 15 #2
Thirty minutes later, her phone vibrated with a text. “Mansfield is in custody.” Another text arrived. “He’ll be interviewed tonight. If he cooperates, we may know more by morning. If he doesn’t, we build the case without him.”
“There’s something else we need to address,” Luke said.
He leaned forward with his forearms on the table.
“Mansfield’s surveillance was watching Hartwell archives.
It wasn’t watching the VA disbursement accounts.
That tells us what his tripwire was for.
It doesn’t tell us whether he’s connected to the VA fraud in some other way.
“Mansfield controlled the entire security apparatus in that building,” he continued.
“Camera feeds, badge swipes, access logs—all of it ran through his department. If someone inside Treasury was diverting VA funds through fake nonprofits, Mansfield’s systems would have generated flags the same way they did with Hartwell.
Access patterns, after-hours logins, unusual database queries.
His department was supposed to catch exactly this kind of activity. ”
“You think he saw it and ignored it,” Coleman said.
“I think we have to consider that. He already proved he’s willing to look the other way when it’s in his interest. If whoever is running the VA fraud knew Mansfield was compromised, they had the perfect cover.
The one person whose job was to catch them was the one person who couldn’t afford to report anything suspicious out of fear of drawing attention to his own problems.”
“That would explain why the fraud has gone undetected for so long,” Alice said.
“I kept running into gaps in the monitoring data. Alerts that should have triggered, but didn’t.
Logs that looked clean when they shouldn’t have been.
I assumed whoever was running the fraud was sophisticated enough to cover their tracks.
But if the person responsible for reviewing those alerts was deliberately not reviewing them, that’s a simpler explanation. ”
“Mansfield didn’t need to be involved in the VA fraud to be useful to whoever was running it,” Atticus said. “He had to look the other way.”
“There’s another possibility,” Brenna said. “Mansfield may have figured out who’s behind the VA fraud and used that information as his own insurance. He stays quiet on their end; they stay quiet on his.”
“What about the security systems themselves?” Coleman asked. “If Mansfield was suppressing alerts related to the VA fraud, those alerts still exist somewhere in the raw data. He could bury the notifications, but he couldn’t erase the underlying activity.”
“Give me access to the unfiltered logs, and I can reconstruct what his filters were suppressing,” Alice said.
“If someone has been accessing the VA disbursement accounts in ways that should have triggered a review, I’ll find the original flags.
But I need Mansfield’s administrator credentials and the filter configurations he built.
Without those, I’m reverse-engineering months of suppression blind. ”
“I can get them,” I said. “Derek will talk to me. Not to Soledad, not to an FBI agent he’s never met. He’ll talk to me because of my father. I’ll go see him first thing in the morning.”
Coleman met my eyes but didn’t argue. Brenna opened her mouth, then stopped herself.
“Brenna, can you arrange access via Soledad?” I asked.
“I’ll have it set up by eight.”
“Alice, be ready. I’ll get as much as I can.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
The call ended. Luke gathered his things and left without saying much. Coleman locked up while I stood at the kitchen window, looking out at the water.
“I’m going to take a bath,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
I ran the water and lowered myself in. The heat loosened the tension in my neck and shoulders enough that I could lean back and close my eyes.
Coleman’s footfalls sounded in the hallway, then he came into the bathroom.
“Room for one more?”
“Of course.”
He undressed and climbed in behind me. I settled against his chest, and his arms circled my waist.
“Tell me something about Derek I don’t already know.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever comes to mind.”
I thought about it. Not the things I’d already told the team or Brenna or Atticus. Something I hadn’t told anyone.
“When I was twelve, Derek took me to a Nationals game. My dad was having a rough stretch, and my mom needed a break from both of us. Derek showed up on a Saturday morning and told my mother he needed to ‘borrow me.’ He’d gotten first-row tickets right by third base and bought me a hot dog so loaded with relish that it dripped down my arm and all over my shirt.
That’s when he first started calling me Drip. ”
Coleman chuckled, and I nuzzled closer to him.
“He pretended not to know a thing about baseball and called the pitcher the quarterback and the catcher the goalie. It got more ridiculous from there, and I laughed so hard my stomach ached.”
“Not from the hot dog?”
“Probably a little of both.”
“Every time, I’d correct him, and he’d say ‘Right, right,’ and then two minutes later, he’d ask why the shortstop wasn’t guarding the goal.
We’d gotten so loud that, by the seventh inning stretch, the woman next to us shushed me.
Derek told her we were very sorry and then asked me, very loudly, if I thought the halftime show would have a marching band. ”
Coleman’s thumb moved across my stomach, but he didn’t say anything.
“He taught me to drive. My dad tried and gave up after I hit the mailbox twice. Derek took me to the parking lot at his church on Sundays when nobody was there and let me practice three-point turns for an hour at a time. He never raised his voice, even when I clipped the dumpster behind the rectory. He told the priest it was wind damage.”
“The priest believed that?”
“Father Donahue had known Derek for twenty years. I’m sure he didn’t believe a word of it.
” I paused. “Every Thanksgiving, he’d bring this sweet potato casserole his wife made.
It was terrible. Burned marshmallows on top, and the potatoes were always gritty.
My mother would serve it and smile, and after they left, she’d scrape the whole dish into the trash.
This went on for years. One Thanksgiving, I was helping clean up, and I asked her why she didn’t just tell Elaine.
She said, ‘Because the look of pride on Derek’s face when he carries it in for her is worth every bite I have to force myself to take.
’ My dad would take a huge serving and eat every bite with a straight face.
After Dad died, Derek still brought it. First Thanksgiving without my father, and there was Derek, at the door, with that dish, and I almost lost it. ”
I stopped. I hadn’t planned to go there.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be.”
I traced a line along his forearm. “Your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“Something I don’t know.”
He was quiet for so long that I thought he’d shut down the way he had earlier. Then his chest expanded with a deep breath.
“When Jake was fourteen—I was eleven—our dad was grilling for the Fourth of July, and he told us to stay out of the garage because he’d bought fireworks and didn’t want us anywhere near them until dark. So naturally, Jake was in the garage within ten minutes.”
“Naturally.”
“He found the box and decided the bottle rockets were too small to be any good. He wanted to make a bigger one. He duct-taped three of them together, stuck them in an empty Coke bottle, and lit all three fuses at once.”
“Where were you?”
“Holding the Coke bottle.”
“He made his little brother hold it?”
“Jake was persuasive. The rockets launched sideways, hit the side of the garage, bounced off the gutter, and landed on the roof of our neighbor’s shed, which had a dried-out wreath on the door from the previous Christmas.”
“Oh my God.”
“So Jake grabs the garden hose, and I grab the ladder. By the time our dad came around the corner, we had the fire out and Jake was on the roof of the shed, stomping on what was left of the wreath. Our dad stood in the driveway with a spatula in his hand and didn’t say a word for about thirty seconds.
Then he said, ‘Which one of you is going to explain this to Mrs. Patterson?’”
“Which one of you did?”
“Jake knocked on her door, told her the whole truth, and offered to buy her a new wreath. Mrs. Patterson was over eighty and laughed so hard she had to sit down on her porch step. Then she asked if we had any more bottle rockets, because she’d always wanted to see one up close.”
“Did you?”
“Jake brought her three. She kept them on her windowsill but never lit them. Every time we walked past her house, she’d wave and motion to where they sat.”
Water sloshed against the sides of the tub as the two of us laughed.
“He couldn’t leave anything alone,” Coleman mused. “If there was a problem, he’d fix it. If there wasn’t one, he’d find one so he could fix that too. Drove everyone crazy. Drove me crazy.” His arms tightened around me. “I’d give anything to have him drive me crazy one more time.”