"Thank you, Hayley," Loretta said. "And thank you for making certain we have an accurate record."
Ben Price stood from the third row when Patricia asked whether anyone who cleared Conference Room B wished to describe what they remembered. He said the tables were almost always untouched, the chairs pushed in, and the coffee left to go cold. He had never seen a conference in progress when he entered to clean, though he too admitted he could not speak for every minute of every morning. When he finished, he looked toward Bradley with an expression of exhausted curiosity, as though asking why anybody had paid so much for a meeting he had spent eighteen months cleaning up after.
Bradley gestured impatiently toward the screen. "Conference rooms aren't the whole contract. That doesn't prove anything."
"You're right," Loretta said. "It does not prove every service was fictitious. It gives us a reason to ask for the work. We asked for the reports, the attendance, the correspondence, and the people who delivered the advice. So far, the documentation is incomplete and some of it has inconsistencies the auditors must investigate."
She turned to Dennis. "Mr. Vale, the approval records show your name on each of the completed Lakeside payments. Is that correct?"
Dennis stood halfway from his chair. He looked toward Bradley, then toward the independent auditors seated along the side wall. "The finance records will speak for themselves," he said. "I approved the invoices presented to me under the process we used at the time. I've asked for counsel before I give a more detailed account."
"That's your right," Loretta answered. "You should use it."
Bradley looked irritated by the response. "You see? Dennis approved them. We had a contract. We had a process. You can't turn ordinary business into a scandal because you didn't like how I treated some visitor."
Loretta lifted the last page of her notebook. "Friday night at eleven-forty, this appeared on my phone," she said. The screen changed to show a carefully redacted copy of the pending owner-approval notification. "An additional one hundred and eighty thousand dollars to Lakeside Advisory. I did not approve it. The system lists Bradley Kincaid as requester and Dennis Vale as finance approver."
A murmur moved through the room. Several managers had seen requests over the new threshold, but they had not realized how quickly the approval control would become important. Loretta explained that the completed payments and the attempted final payment were different kinds of evidence. The money already paid required tracing and verification; the pending request showed someone had sought to complete the contract even while the new owners were preparing to review it.
"Bradley," she said, "when you told Dennis to submit that invoice on Friday night, I was standing two steps away holding your empty glass. I heard you say that owners sign and don't read. I heard you say nobody digs into a finished contract. Would you like to explain what you meant?"