Chapter 6: The Woman in Indianapolis
Her name was Dora Reyes.
She was sixty-one years old, and she had worked as the bookkeeper for the Vance carpentry workshop — Alejandro's family business — for eleven years.
She met me at a diner two blocks from the workshop on a Thursday morning.
She was already seated when I arrived, a small woman with careful eyes and a paper coffee cup she kept turning in both hands.
"Mrs.
Vance," she said.
"Camila," I told her, and sat down across from her.
She looked at me for a moment with an expression I recognized.
She was deciding how much to trust me.
"I saw the news about the divorce filing," she said.
"My nephew showed me.
He follows things online." She set the coffee cup down.
"I've been wanting to call someone for eight months.
I just didn't know who."
"You can tell me," I said.
She nodded once, as though she had already made the decision before I arrived and just needed to hear herself confirm it.
"The money you were sending," she said.
"Every month.
It stopped coming in October."
"I know.
My attorney stopped the transfers after my surgery."
"Before it stopped — for about fourteen months — it wasn't going to the workshop." She opened her bag and placed a thin folder on the table between us.
"Mr.
Vance Senior — Alejandro's father — he passed two years ago.
His mother moved to her sister's place in Phoenix.
The workshop was supposed to be closed.
But the account stayed open.
And the money kept arriving."
I opened the folder.
Bank statements.
Deposits matching the amounts I had been sending.
And then, within three to five days of each deposit, a transfer out.
Always to the same account number.
"Do you know whose account that is?" I asked.
"I didn't at first.
I only saw the outgoing number.
But eight months ago I ran into a man at the workshop — he had a key.
He said he was handling the property sale.
He gave me his card." She reached into the folder and placed a business card on top of the statements.
Marcus Veil.
Financial Consulting.
I looked at it for a long moment.
"He was using the workshop account as a pass-through," I said.
"Every month.
Like clockwork.
Your money came in and went straight to him within the week."
"Did Alejandro's father know?"
Dora shook her head.
"Mr.
Vance Senior was a good man.
Simple man.
He thought the money was a gift from his son's wife.
He was grateful for it." She paused.
"He d*ed not knowing any of this."
I thought about Alejandro's father.
I had met him four times over fifteen years.
A quiet man who smelled like sawdust and always shook my hand with both of his.
"Dora," I said.
"Would you be willing to give a formal statement?
To my attorney, and possibly to investigators?"
She looked at the folder, then at me.
"That's why I called," she said.
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers for just a moment.
She didn't pull away.
We sat there a little longer.
She told me about the workshop, about Alejandro's father, about the way the business had slowly wound down after his health declined.
She told me she had kept the records because she didn't know what else to do with them, and because something had told her they mattered.
"You kept them for eleven years," I said.
"Habit," she said.
But she was almost smiling.
I drove back to Chicago with the folder on the passenger seat.
My phone rang when I was forty minutes outside the city.
I answered through the car speakers.
It was Alejandro.
"I know you went to Indiana," he said.
His voice was flat.
Controlled in a different way than before — not smooth now, but compressed.
Like something held under pressure.
"Did you."
"Whatever she told you — that woman doesn't understand what she was looking at.
She's a bookkeeper, Camila.
She saw numbers.
She doesn't know the context."
"What is the context, Alejandro?"
"The money was being managed.
Invested.
I was trying to grow it for my parents.
Veil was helping me do that."
"By routing it through a defunct workshop account and transferring it to his own firm."
Silence.
"That's not what happened."
"I have the statements," I said.
"Fourteen months of them."
The silence this time was different.
Longer.
I could hear him breathing.
"Camila." His voice shifted.
Lower.
Something I hadn't heard before.
"I need you to stop this.
I need you to think about what you're doing.
If this goes where you're taking it, it won't just affect me.
It will affect people who had nothing to do with any of this.
My mother.
She's sixty-four years old and she's in Phoenix and she doesn't know—"
"Then you should have thought about her," I said, "before you handed me divorce papers in a hospital bed."
I ended the call.
Forty minutes later I pulled into the parking structure beneath Richard's building.
He was waiting for me in the lobby.
He looked at my face and didn't ask how it went.
"Claudia called again," he said as we stepped into the elevator.
"She wants a meeting.
In person.
She says there's one more thing she hasn't told us."
May you like
The elevator doors closed.
"Of course there is," I said.
