"I thought maybe everybody had to pay it," Luis said. "Then my cousin opened an account online at another bank and paid nothing. I felt stupid."
"You weren't stupid," Grace told him. "You were supposed to be able to trust what an employee told you."
Tyrone nodded. "That's the whole thing. They didn't just take the money. They made honest men feel like fools for asking where it went."
Nathan asked whether he could have copies of the documents with each person's permission, and Tyrone agreed to help collect written authorizations. Nathan also advised them not to post private account numbers or financial records online. The details would matter later, and a careful investigation needed the people involved to remain protected. That was not how an ordinary checking-account customer usually spoke, but Tyrone was too focused on the possibility of being heard to question it.
After they left the site, Grace sat quietly in the passenger seat of Nathan's truck for several blocks. She had borrowed a small sedan that morning, but had left it outside Doris's building so they could travel together. Watching the construction workers explain what they had lost had sharpened her anger into something heavier. She kept thinking of all the applications she had processed while trying to follow the rules, and of the ones where a manager had leaned over her shoulder and told her to hurry.
"There are more," she said finally. "Doris and Tyrone are just the people who kept records and trusted me enough to speak. I saw complaints from teachers, restaurant workers, people with small savings, and older customers who didn't know there was a way to challenge a fee."
"Did anyone inside the bank report it?" Nathan asked.
"Three of us did. Not to Bradley. Above him. We wrote to regional management because we thought somebody up there would care."
"Who received it?"
"Douglas Crane's office. He oversees the region. I never got an answer other than a note saying our sales practices had been reviewed and found consistent with performance expectations."
Nathan pulled into an empty church parking lot and turned off the engine. Grace looked at him as if he had made a wrong turn, but he stayed behind the wheel with both hands resting lightly on it. Douglas Crane was a name that appeared frequently in corporate presentations as a model of sales leadership. His region had beaten its targets every quarter for nearly two years, and nobody on Nathan's executive team had looked hard enough at why.
"Do you have the email?" he asked.
"A copy of my own complaint, yes. June and another teller signed it. I kept a copy in my personal records because I was afraid it might disappear like the customer complaints."
"Good," he said. "Keep the original. Don't hand it to anyone who can't give you a proper receipt."
Grace looked at him. "You sound as if tomorrow somebody is going to start valuing evidence."
"Tomorrow," he answered, "somebody should have valued it a long time ago."