Eleanor arrived at my office the following morning at nine forty-five. She was as composed as she had been the first time — charcoal coat, folded hands, the posture of someone who expected to be in control of a room.
I told her I had found significant financial irregularities in the subsidiary structure. I told her they were consistent with what Victor Laine had described. I told her I had passed my findings to the relevant authorities before our meeting.
She looked at me for a moment. Then she stood.
“You’ve made a mistake,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve made them before.”
She left. I watched her cross the street to the dark blue car. This time I had the angle and the light and I noted the plate.
I forwarded it to my contact before the car reached the corner.
I don’t know yet how it will end. The investigation is active and I am not part of it. I gave them what I found and I named what I saw and now it belongs to people with more authority than I have.
What I know is this: Eleanor Marsh hired a private investigator to audit her own exposure and chose someone she thought she could aim and redirect and dismiss. She had underestimated what nine years of reading the gap between what people said and what people knew had taught me.
Victor Laine had found something and paid for it. I had found the same thing and called the right number before she walked back through my door.
Whether that is enough is not yet a question I can answer.
But I have the plate. And I made the call. And sometimes that is all the work you can do — you find what’s there, and you make sure it lands somewhere it can’t be buried.
The rest is out of your hands.
That’s the part of the job I have never quite learned to be comfortable with.
I suspect I never will.
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