Chapter 6

Vasquez knelt again, right there on the carpet, and laid the two halves side by side.

Then she pressed them together, held them up under the chandelier, and read out loud.

"Four million, two hundred thousand dollars."

The ballroom went quiet the way a room goes quiet when a nurse walks in.

"Sender: Ruben J. Coyle. Receiver: St. Bridget's Foundation." She turned the paper slightly so the light moved across it. "Memo: Pediatric wing - in memory of Margaret Coyle."

Halloway laughed. It was a good laugh, well-placed, but it came half a beat late, and half a beat is a long time in a room that size.

"It's a forgery," he said. "The real donors are a family from Chicago. Their flight lands tonight. I've been working with them for two years-"

"Name them," Vasquez said.

"I'm not going to-"

"Name one of them."

Halloway's mouth opened and closed. At the bar, the woman in emerald silk turned to the man next to her and said something Ruben couldn't hear, and the man frowned.

Curtis Bell had come in from the check-in table with the binder under his arm. He stood at the edge of the carpet, holding it like a man holding a phone he's been told to put away.

"Mr. Halloway," he said. "You closed my binder."

"Go back to your table, Curtis."

"There's a seating sheet in it." Curtis's voice was steady; he had worked maintenance at St. Bridget's for four decades and he had never once been afraid of a director. "Printed three weeks ago. Head table, R. Coyle, requested by W.O. That's Mr. Osei. That's in the foundation's own system."

Ruben watched it land. Two board members stood up at the same moment. A physician near the head table took out his phone.

"Where did the paper come from?" Vasquez asked Ruben, quietly, just to him.

"The credit union mailed it to me," he said. "The original went to the foundation three years ago. Nobody ever acknowledged it. In June I got an envelope from the branch with a duplicate inside and a note that said the receiving institution had never returned the signed copy." He paused. "It came to my house because my name was on the sender line."

"And the signature at the bottom?"

Ruben pointed at the stub. "That's his."

Vasquez turned the joined halves toward the light and read the blue ink out loud, slowly, so that the front three tables could hear it.

"Countersigned. Grant Halloway. July nineteenth."

From the far end of the ballroom, a chair scraped back. Warren Osei was standing at the head table with a napkin still in his hand.

"Mr. Brandt," he said, and his voice carried without effort, the way a man's voice does when he has spent thirty years in rooms where people stop talking when he starts. "Go down to the office. Bring me the vault folder marked Anonymous."