Chapter 6: The Person Who Started It All
I excused myself from the table during the recess my father called to allow Agent Reyes to formally process the delivered materials.
Patricia caught my arm as I stood.
"Where are you going?"
I showed her the text.
She read it twice.
"Do you know who this is?"
"No."
She looked toward the door, then back at me.
"Don't go alone."
I nodded, and she walked with me.
The courthouse hallway was long and bright, floored in pale stone that made every footstep echo.
Most of the benches were empty.
Court was in session in three other rooms down the corridor.
A maintenance worker pushed a cart past us without looking up.
A woman was sitting at the far end of the hall, near the window.
She was in her fifties.
Dark coat.
Gray at her temples.
Her hands were folded in her lap and she was sitting very straight, the way people sit when they've been waiting a long time and have made peace with it.
She looked up when she heard us coming.
She looked at me.
Not at Patricia.
At me.
"You're Claire," she said.
"I am."
"I'm Margaret Cho.
I was the external auditor your husband hired eighteen months ago to review the company's vendor contracts." She paused.
"He hired me to build a paper trail blaming you.
I didn't do it."
Patricia's grip on her folder tightened.
I sat down on the bench across from her.
"Why not?" I said.
Margaret looked at her hands.
"Because the signature discrepancies were obvious from day one.
He had someone copying your signature from the founding documents.
Badly.
Any qualified auditor would have caught it." She looked up.
"He assumed I'd file what he needed without looking too closely.
He was paying enough that he thought I would."
"But you didn't."
"I left the engagement.
Told him the vendor contracts had too many irregularities and I couldn't certify them." She paused.
"Then I found out I wasn't the only auditor he'd approached.
He hired someone after me.
A man named Gerald Voss.
Voss was less careful."
"Voss is the signature on the fraudulent audit report," Patricia said.
"Yes."
"Do you have documentation of when you were engaged and when you terminated?" Patricia asked.
"I have the engagement letter, the termination notice, my original working papers, and three emails in which Mr.
Calloway explicitly asked me to attribute the vendor discrepancies to, and I'm quoting, the co-founder's oversight failures." Margaret opened her bag and removed an envelope.
"I've been carrying these since the financial crimes unit called me last month."
She held the envelope out to Patricia.
Patricia took it.
"Why didn't you come forward sooner?" I asked.
Margaret was quiet for a moment.
"Because I wasn't sure it mattered," she said.
"He's a wealthy man with a good attorney.
I'm a small practice auditor.
I filed the anonymous referral because I thought it would stay anonymous.
I didn't expect—" She gestured toward the courtroom doors.
"I didn't expect any of this to move this fast."
"It moved fast," Patricia said, "because Mrs.
Calloway's own audit was thorough."
Margaret looked at me again.
"How did you know what to look for?"
"I built the compliance system he was using to hide the transfers," I said.
"I knew every gap in it."
Something shifted in her expression.
Not surprise, exactly.
More like recognition.
"He called you a decorative wife," she said.
"He filed an affidavit saying so."
"He said the same thing about me," Margaret said.
"In those three emails.
He called me a small-time operator who wouldn't understand the complexity of what he was building." She smoothed the front of her coat.
"I understood it perfectly."
We sat with that for a moment.
Down the hall, a door opened and a bailiff leaned out.
"Ms.
Shen?
The judge is ready to reconvene."
Patricia stood.
She put the envelope into her briefcase.
"Ms.
Cho," she said, "I'll need you to be available to testify if called.
Today or on a future date."
"I'm available," Margaret said.
She said it the way someone says it when they've already decided.
I stood.
The pain across my abdomen had dulled to a deep ache, steady and manageable.
My daughter had been moving again for the last hour, small slow rolls, as though she was rearranging herself.
I put one hand against my side.
"Thank you," I said to Margaret.
She nodded.
"He should have picked a different auditor," she said.
May you like
I almost smiled.
"He should have picked a different wife," I said.
