The federal debrief should have been routine — closing paperwork, final confirmations, the last administrative footnotes to a case that had consumed the better part of Desmond's adult life. Wren had come along mostly for Desmond's sake, sitting in on the meeting at the federal building in Charlotte while Cruz stayed home with Ana, and it was there, in a windowless conference room lined with banker's boxes, that Agent Nakamura said something that made the room's careful sense of closure c***k open again.
"There's a discrepancy," Nakamura said, sliding a spreadsheet across the table. "We cross-referenced every disbursement in Marsh's ledger against known recipients. Almost everything accounts for cleanly — every dollar tracked to a name we've already prosecuted or identified." She tapped a
