Chapter 14
Because the investigation uncovered something none of us expected.
Raymond Reed had discovered irregular payments months earlier.
He just hadn’t told Eddie.
When the bank’s investigators interviewed him, he provided emails showing that he had questioned Hollis about the transfers.
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?” Eddie asked when his attorney called.
The answer came the following day.
Pride.
Raymond had been embarrassed.
His reputation rested on being a man who knew what happened around him. Admitting that someone might have used his companies to move money made him look careless.
So instead of reporting it, he had quietly told Hollis to fix the discrepancies.
Hollis apparently did.
For a while.
Then Marcy began asking questions.
That was why the invoices became harder to trace.
Why Eddie’s loan application had been mysteriously canceled.
Why several passwords had been changed.
Cal wasn’t part of a criminal empire.
He was a middle-aged business manager covering years of small dishonest decisions that had grown into larger ones.
Not dramatic.
Not glamorous.
Just sad.
He had borrowed money from accounts intending to replace it.
Then borrowed more to hide the first shortage.
Then shifted transactions to cover the second.
Eventually, hiding the truth had become his full-time job.
“What happens to him?” Dustin asked.
We were back at the gym.
Eddie had closed for the afternoon while bank auditors copied records.
“That’s between him, the bank, and the law,” I said.
Dustin nodded.
A week earlier, I would have wanted a more satisfying answer.
Now I understood that real life rarely ended with villains receiving perfectly measured consequences while everybody else applauded.
Sometimes the truth simply became visible.
And people had to live with what it showed.
There was still one mystery.
Marcy’s missing printout.
The security guard remembered seeing it when he found her bag.
Yet it wasn’t there when Eddie collected it.
For three days, everyone assumed Cal had taken it.
Then a woman named Teresa from the office cleaning staff called Marcy.
May you like
“I have something that might be yours.”
She had found several wet papers beside the steps the night Marcy fell.
