Chapter 6 - THE PEOPLE WHO WERE STILL ALIVE
The first name came from an old invoice that nobody had considered important. Emilia Castillo's treatment travel had been approved for eight thousand dollars, but the trust's bank record showed eighty thousand. Alongside the larger amount was a second entry: a private care placement assigned to a patient named Ruth Evers, marked deceased at age nineteen.
Detective Shah's research assistant found a Ruth Evers who was very much alive. She lived in Albany, worked in a public library, and had recently married. Her date of birth matched the foundation file; her recorded death date did not. Shah arranged to contact her through an attorney rather than sending officers to her workplace.
Emma heard about the discovery from Teresa. Her mother remembered Ruth as a teenager with a rare blood disorder whose parents had struggled to find appropriate treatment. She remembered getting a thank-you card, not a death notice. The card, she thought, might still be among her old correspondence.
"Why would anyone mark someone dead?" Emma asked.
"To close a grant, maybe," Teresa said. "Or conceal that the expense wasn't real. But they wouldn't need to invent a death to commit every kind of fraud. Somebody chose that for a reason."
Emma had come to recognize her mother's habit of considering two possibilities at once. It was the same habit that had made Teresa useful at the trust and inconvenient to its auditors.
Shah later confirmed that several patient files showed the same pattern: an actual approved service, an inflated disbursement, then a death notation unsupported by medical records. Investigators were reviewing which entries belonged to real patients, which were duplicates, and which might be entirely invented. The emerging total was substantial, but they refused to publish a number before reconciling the accounts.
"And the twenty million?" Emma asked during a meeting with Shah and an assistant prosecutor, Miriam Cole.
"The newer transfer appears to have gathered funds from multiple accounts after a restructuring," Cole explained. "Some of the transfers may be lawful reimbursements. Others have documentation we cannot verify. We can seek to freeze disputed funds while their origin is established."
"Is that enough to arrest Victoria?"
"The assault is a separate matter with strong witness evidence," Cole said. "The financial case requires proof of intent and involvement. We won't treat proximity to a document as proof she devised the scheme."
Emma nodded. The precision was frustrating, but it also protected her mother, whose signature had been used to make an innocent grant look suspicious.
That evening, Dante invited Emma to meet with the foundation's interim administrators at an independent lawyer's office. She accepted because the agenda included protections for current beneficiaries. She declined when he offered to collect her in his own car.
"I know you want to help," she told him over the phone. "But people need to see me as a person with information, not as somebody you've taken under your wing."
"Understood."
"You say that a lot now."
"I'm trying to make it true."
At the meeting, the acting director, an accountant named Grace Hsu, proposed temporary oversight by trustees with no prior ties to the Moretti businesses. Emergency patient assistance would continue through a hospital-administered account, while disputed administrative expenses were suspended. Emma was surprised to see patient advocates at the table, two of them parents who had previously received support from the foundation.
One father described being told his daughter's transportation voucher had already been redeemed when no driver had arrived. A mother said a promised hotel room was never reserved. Their voices remained polite, but Emma could hear how much effort the politeness required.
Dante listened without interruption. When his turn came, he acknowledged that he had signed annual certifications without reading the supporting documents closely enough. He offered to fund the interim program personally, with expenditure approvals handled by independent administrators and documented separately from the criminal investigation.
"You understand that a contribution doesn't resolve questions about your earlier oversight," Grace said.
"I do," Dante replied.
Emma looked at him, wondering whether the distinction would still matter to him when the newspapers began calling it a scandal. She did not know. But he had accepted it in a room full of people who could hold him to that answer.
Afterward, Grace asked Emma whether she would speak to the trustees about how intimidation had affected employees' willingness to report irregularities. Emma agreed to consider it. She was still recovering; she was still frightened; and she had never imagined speaking to a board of trustees about anything. But her mother had once tried to warn this organization, and perhaps Emma could help make sure the next warning reached someone who listened.
On the way out, she saw Marco waiting by the elevators. He was not armed visibly, and his posture seemed less formidable outside the mansion. He said the investigation into the rear entrance had led to an independent security subcontractor. Anton Kessler had authorized unusually broad access to the software vendor three days before the attack. A technician confirmed that someone using Anton's login had duplicated Celia's credential.
"Do you think he was working for Alexander?" Emma asked.
"There are communications between Anton and an intermediary who also billed a Romano company," Marco said. "Investigators have them. Whether Alexander directed the attack is still unknown."
"Why would a man risk prison to open one door?"
"Money. Fear. Loyalty to someone he shouldn't trust. I don't know which."
Marco hesitated. "I also need to apologize. I supervised that security system. I approved Anton's promotion. I treated complaints about him as personality conflicts."
"He made the choices he made," Emma said. "You made yours."
Marco bowed his head. "That's fair."
Her mother called just as Emma reached the street. Teresa sounded unusually alert. She had remembered a name: Michael Bellamy's secretary, a woman named June Mercer. June had typed Francesca's confidential reports and had once warned Teresa that the accounting office was shredding grant files before their required retention period.
"Where is she now?" Emma asked.
"I haven't spoken to her in years. But I remember her brother worked at a neighborhood newspaper in the Bronx. He used to write about hospital closures."
Emma passed the information to Shah, who promised to follow up.
Three days later, June Mercer walked into a prosecutor's office carrying a small metal box and a letter from her late employer. She was seventy-one, with silver hair braided down her back and the quick movements of someone who disliked wasting time. She explained that she had not contacted investigators before because she feared her former colleagues would destroy the remaining records if they learned what she possessed.
"That fear has cost people dearly," Cole told her gently.
"I know," June answered. "I don't need anyone to forgive me. I need them to read what I kept."
Inside the box were carbon copies of correspondence, a duplicate appointment ledger, and a blue notebook bound with cloth tape. On its first page, Francesca Moretti had written a list of questions about missing patient files. Several later entries described meetings with Peter Vale, who insisted that high disbursements were justified by emergency relocation expenses. Francesca had asked for receipts. He had promised them. They never appeared in the surviving records.
The notebook's final dated entry was written six days before her death. It mentioned an appointment with Michael Bellamy and contained a line underlined twice: IF RUTH EVERS IS ALIVE, WHY DID WE PAY FOR HER FUNERAL?
Emma was not permitted to keep the notebook. Cole read selected portions aloud with June's consent so Teresa could help identify the cases. She declined to share details that would compromise the ongoing investigation. Emma appreciated that boundary, even while longing to know everything.
The next day Ruth Evers agreed to speak. She confirmed she had received medical support as a teenager and had never been relocated under another identity. When shown a copy of the trust's supposed funeral claim, she stared at it for a long time.
"That's my mother's signature," she said. "But she died two years before this was dated."
The room went silent. Emma felt Teresa's hand tighten around hers.
"Do you know who might have signed on her behalf?" Cole asked.
Ruth shook her head. "No. But the funeral home listed here is where my father worked. He managed the books until he retired."
Another person who might know the truth. Another door in the case.
That evening, Emma returned to her own apartment for the first time since the assault. She had changed the locks through a tenant-assistance program and arranged for a friend to stay overnight. The rooms smelled of laundry detergent and the basil plant dying on the windowsill. She was relieved to see the chipped mug by the sink, the shopping list on the refrigerator, the little signs that ordinary life had continued to exist without her.
She was making tea when a news alert appeared on her phone. Victoria Moretti had been located alive. Her attorney said she had been in hiding after receiving threats and was prepared to give a statement to prosecutors.
Emma read it twice. She wanted Victoria to face consequences for hurting her. She also wanted the woman to be alive, to be able to answer questions rather than become another blank space in the records.
A second notification arrived. It was a forwarded copy of a letter sent to Dante's attorney.
Victoria claimed she had helped move funds at the instruction of someone inside the Moretti family. She said she could prove it, but would not provide the name until her safety was assured.
Emma set down her tea.
May you like
The case had always seemed to lead away from the mansion, toward people like Peter Vale and Alexander Romano. Now a different possibility stood waiting in the doorway: that the foundation had been betrayed by someone who knew the family's weaknesses from the inside.
And that Victoria, for all her cruelty, might have been telling part of the truth.
