Chapter 7 - The Audit
While the media circus descended on Madison Avenue, I was sitting four miles south, in a secure conference room on the fifth floor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse on Pearl Street.
The table was covered with ninety-six individual file folders, six external hard drives, and the fourteen Briarwood diamonds, which sat in a velvet-lined evidence tray between two armed federal marshals.
Assistant United States Attorney David Cho sat across from me, a legal pad filled with his tight, left-handed scrawl resting between his elbows. He was thirty-eight, sharp-featured, and had spent five years dismantling corrupt hedge funds before taking over the Southern District’s enterprise corruption unit.
"Mrs. Vance," Cho said, looking up from his notes. He had pointedly used my maiden name, honoring the correction I had made on my initial appearance form. "The documentation you provided on the 1911 Kimberley export fraud is extraordinarily thorough. Where did you access the Cape Colony maritime manifests?"
"The National Archives in Pretoria digitized their colonial port records four years ago," I said, my voice steady, my hands resting calmly on the table. "Most auction house compliance teams only check the London export registries because that’s where the consignors claim the stones were acquired. But if you want to verify genuine title on rough material from that era, you have to cross-reference the harbor master's clearance logs in Cape Town. Eleanor never thought anyone would look at the original manifests because she assumed the colonial permits were lost to history."
Cho tapped his pen against the pad. "And the advance from Manhattan Commercial Trust?"
"Constructive fraud from its inception," I replied. "Eleanor submitted a forged provenance affidavit asserting that the stones had been continuous family property of the Briarwoods since 1908. She used that affidavit to secure an eight-million-dollar credit line. She then transferred six million of that line through three correspondent banks in Cyprus to fund the initial capitalization of Althaus Capital—her own shell company. The plan was simple: report the stones stolen, collect the four-million-dollar insurance settlement from Lloyd’s of London, use the insurance payout to clear the bank loan, and retain both the physical diamonds and the two million in net arbitrage."
Cho let out a low whistle, shaking his head. "And she was going to let you take the fall for grand larceny to keep the Southern District from looking behind the curtain."
"She didn't just want me to take the fall, Mr. Cho," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "She needed me to be convicted. If the integrity director of the firm were proven to be an opportunistic thief from Queens, the narrative was neat and self-contained. The board could fire me, apologize to the insurance syndicate, claim they were the victims of an internal rogue employee, and close the file before anyone examined the corporate general ledger."
The door to the conference room opened. A junior investigator stepped in, leaned down, and whispered something into Cho’s ear, handing him a freshly printed sheet of paper.
Cho read the paper, his eyebrows rising slightly. He looked up at me.
"Julian Thorne is downstairs," Cho said. "He’s been waiting in the central rotunda for two hours. He’s brought his personal estate attorney, and he’s requesting five minutes to speak with you before we release our preliminary press statement."
I looked at the window. Outside, the gray light of Lower Manhattan was reflected in the glass towers of the financial district.
"Is he a subject of this investigation, Mr. Cho?"
"At this stage, no," Cho replied frankly. "The server logs clear him of any direct access to the HVAC override, and Silas Mercer’s statement confirms that Mr. Thorne was in a scheduled budget meeting on the fourth floor when the pressure drop occurred. Furthermore, he has just executed a full cooperation agreement on behalf of Thorne & Vale, waiving all attorney-client privileges regarding Eleanor’s internal communications."
Cho paused, watching my face carefully. "You have no legal obligation to see him, Norah. I can have the marshals escort him out of the building."
I sat in silence for several seconds, feeling the weight of the last three years pressing against my collarbone. I thought of the small chapel in Maine. I thought of the mornings we had spent drinking coffee in our kitchen, planning an exhibition that would strip the pretension from ancient art and make it accessible to people who worked with their hands.
May you like
And then I thought of those two words, spoken without hesitation beneath a crystal chandelier: Search her.
"Tell him I'll give him three minutes," I said. "In the glass interview room down the hall."
