Chapter 5 - The Name on the Transfer
Quinn did not let Marcus watch the video twice.
She copied it to evidence, sealed Arthur’s drive, and told a trooper to find out whether Peter Vale had crossed a bridge, boarded a train, rented a car, or used a credit card in the previous three hours.
Marcus stood beside the desk.
“What was in the syringe?”
“We don’t know.”
“My sister had it.”
“I can see that.”
“My father was in that house.”
“I can see that too.”
Her voice was flat, not unkind.
“Go sit with your son.”
Marcus did not move.
Quinn opened another folder.
NORTHLINE.
A spreadsheet filled the screen.
Transfers ran down the left side in date order. Fifty-eight thousand. One hundred twenty. Three hundred ten. Small enough at first to disappear inside a company the size of Carrow Materials.
Then they grew.
The total at the bottom was $8,642,000.
“What account is that?” Marcus asked.
Quinn zoomed in.
EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT RESERVE.
Marcus put both hands on the back of the chair.
Six hundred people worked for Carrow Materials. Arthur knew the names of half of them. Marcus had spent most of his adult life pretending that was sentimental nonsense.
Now eight million dollars of their retirement money was gone.
Every outgoing transfer had an approval.
Some were Susan’s.
Some were Vincent’s.
Seven were Marcus’s.
He looked closer.
“They’re forged.”
Quinn clicked one.
May 18. $740,000.
Marcus had supposedly approved it from the Albany office.
“I was in Chicago.”
“You can prove that?”
“Flight. Hotel. A speech. Two hundred people.”
She opened another.
June 2.
Marcus laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“That one is impossible.”
“Why?”
“I was having surgery.”
Quinn looked at him.
“Gallbladder. Massachusetts General. I was under anesthesia when I apparently moved nine hundred thousand dollars.”
She wrote that down.
At the bottom of the spreadsheet was one line in red.
PENDING — $3,200,000.
Release time: 8:30 a.m.
Verification: callback to M. CARROW MOBILE.
Marcus checked the time.
2:39.
“My phone.”
Quinn was already moving.
The state police contacted the bank at 2:47.
At 2:53, the bank’s overnight fraud manager said the transfer had not been released.
At 3:11, he called back.
Someone had just completed the verification.
The callback had gone to Marcus’s personal number.
A man had answered.
He knew Marcus’s date of birth, the last four digits of his Social Security number, his mother’s maiden name, and the private verification phrase Arthur had created twenty years earlier.
“What phrase?” Marcus said.
Quinn repeated it.
Two quick, one slow.
Marcus did not sit down.
The transfer cleared at 3:08.
Three point two million dollars moved from the retirement reserve through Northline Advisory and into an account at Hudson Union Bank.
Account name:
BIRCH SEVENTEEN LLC.
The bank would not disclose the beneficial owner without a subpoena.
Quinn got one moving before four.
Marcus went back to the hospital.
Eli was awake again, sitting cross-legged in the family room with a paper cup of hot chocolate he had not touched.
“You found something,” Eli said.
Marcus sat beside him.
“Yes.”
“Bad?”
“Yes.”
Eli nodded once.
Then he said, “Vincent knew the knock.”
Marcus looked at him.
“What?”
“When Grandad knocked. Before I broke the picture. Aunt Susan looked scared. Vincent didn’t. He looked annoyed.”
Marcus went still.
Eli rubbed the torn cuff of his sweatshirt between two fingers.
“He knew what it meant.”
At 4:26, Quinn called.
The subpoena return had arrived unusually fast because Hudson Union’s fraud unit was already awake.
Birch Seventeen LLC had been formed eight months earlier.
The registered agent was a law office in Albany.
The controlling signer was Peter Vale.
But the beneficial owner listed on the bank certification was not Peter.
Quinn read the name.
Marcus looked through the glass wall of the family room toward the hall.
Susan was being brought past in handcuffs for a hospital forensic exam.
The name Quinn had just read was hers.
May you like
Susan Carrow.
