Chapter 7: The Inquiry
The financial crimes unit operated out of a building on West Madison that looked like any other city office — fluorescent lights, laminate desks, the smell of old coffee and printer toner.
Detective Anita Reyes met me in the lobby and walked me back through a corridor lined with closed doors.
She was direct in the way that people are when they have seen too much to bother with softening things.
"Mr.
Hale declined voluntary questioning this morning," she said as we walked.
"His attorney filed a motion to limit the scope of our inquiry.
That motion will not succeed, but it tells us something about how worried he is."
"What does it tell you?"
"That there's more than what you've given us." She pushed open a door.
"Which is already quite a lot."
The room had a table, four chairs, and a window that looked out onto a concrete wall.
Diane was already seated.
Reyes sat across from us and opened a folder.
"I want to walk you through what we know and what we still need," she said.
"Then I want to ask you some questions about Paul Garrett."
"I've never met him," I said.
"I know.
But you may know more about him than you think." She slid a photograph across the table.
"Do you recognize this man?"
The photograph showed two men outside what looked like a restaurant.
One was Marcus.
The other was someone I had seen exactly once — briefly, at a distance, at a charity event Marcus had brought me to eight months earlier.
"He was at an event," I said.
"Marcus introduced him as a college friend.
They spoke for maybe five minutes.
Marcus told me afterward that Paul was in finance."
"Paul Garrett is not in finance," Reyes said.
"Paul Garrett has two prior federal convictions — one for wire fraud, one for securities fraud.
He served four years on the second charge.
He was released eighteen months before Garrett-Hale Consulting was registered."
I looked at Diane.
Diane looked at the table.
"Marcus knew," I said.
"Marcus was his cellmate for fourteen months," Reyes said.
The fluorescent light hummed above us.
"Marcus was in federal prison," I said slowly.
"For eleven months, on a reduced plea.
Financial fraud.
Before you met him." Reyes folded her hands on the table.
"He would have been required to disclose a felony conviction on certain financial applications.
We believe he did not.
We believe Sandra Okafor, in her position at the bank, may have helped facilitate approvals that should have been flagged."
I thought about the woman in the photograph.
Her professional headshot.
Her job title.
"She didn't know what she was helping him hide," I said.
"We don't know that yet," Reyes said.
"But it's possible."
"He told her he loved her," I said.
"The same way he told me."
Reyes said nothing.
She didn't need to.
"What do you need from me?" I asked.
"The recordings.
All four months.
We'll have our audio team process them." She paused.
"And I need to ask you something directly, Mrs.
Hale.
In those four months of recordings — is there anything on them that you haven't told us about?
Anything you heard that you decided not to include in your documentation?"
I looked at her.
"There's a conversation," I said.
"From about six weeks ago.
Marcus was on the phone in the kitchen.
He didn't know I could hear him from the hallway.
He mentioned a storage unit — an address on the South Side.
He said the paperwork there needed to stay where it was until things settled down."
Reyes's pen stopped moving.
"You have that on the recording?"
"Yes."
She looked at her colleague near the door, who had been standing so quietly I had almost forgotten he was there.
"We'll need the address," she said.
I wrote it down from memory on the notepad she slid across the table.
She looked at it for a moment.
May you like
Then she picked up her radio.
And the morning moved very quickly after that.
