the ankle monitor chafing above her left foot, and listened to her house make
the small sounds it made when Paul wasn't in it.
Paul had gone to bed at nine. He hadn't said goodnight. In twenty-three years
of marriage, he had never once failed to say goodnight, and the absence of it
sat in the room like a third person.
On the coffee table: the bail paperwork, the conditions sheet, her phone.
She'd been removed from the HOA group chat at 8:02 — Margaret Ellison,
efficient to the end — but the neighborhood had a second chat, the unofficial
one, and someone had added her to it years ago and forgotten to remove her.
It was still coming through. She'd read four hundred messages. She'd stopped
at the photo of herself in the windbreaker.
She got up — the monitor's band pulled, a reminder with every step — and
went to the window. Across the street, the news van's interior light was on.
Someone inside was eating. The ordinary appetite of it disgusted her.
The flowers were the worst part. She'd replanted the entrance beds herself
every April for six years — impatiens, white, in the exact pattern from the
landscaping plan she'd drawn up when she first became president. She'd done
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it on her knees, in gloves, and people had driven past and waved, and she'd
felt, in those moments, something she couldn't get anywhere else: that the
neighborhood was hers in the way a garden is a gardener's. Not owned.
Tended.
She'd told Grant Porter none of this. He wouldn't have understood. He
understood billable hours.
Her phone buzzed. Doug: they picked me up today. You said it was just
paperwork.
She stared at the message until the screen went dark. Then she typed, You
should have kept your mouth shut, and deleted it, and typed, I'm sorry, and
deleted that too, and put the phone face-down the way she'd seen Tom
Beckett do in the footage — no, not the footage, at the meeting, she'd
watched him do it at the meeting — and went upstairs.
Paul was asleep, or performing it. She lay down on her side of the bed, the
monitor a hard unfamiliar weight against the mattress, and thought about the
syringe under the towel, and the forty seconds of Chloe Beckett's video, and
the way her own hand had looked on the tablet screen — steady, deliberate, a
stranger's hand.
She had told herself, climbing that fence, that she was protecting the
neighborhood. She tried to tell herself again now, in the dark, and found the
words wouldn't hold still.
The forensic accountant arrived on a Thursday with two laptops, a portable
scanner, and the cheerful demeanor of a woman who had seen every possible
way a human being could steal money and was no longer surprised by any of
them.
Her name was Joan Feldman. She was fifty-three, wore cardigans with elbow
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patches, and had spent nineteen years untangling fraud for insurance
companies before going independent. Rachel Simmons had hired her on
Tom's behalf — not because Tom was a suspect, but because Rachel had
said, in her flat Chicago accent, "When the house is on fire, you check every
room, including yours. Especially yours."
Joan set up in Rachel's conference room and spent three days going through
six years of Oakmont Estates HOA financials. On the fourth day, she asked
Rachel to bring Tom in, and she laid it out with the quiet relish of a surgeon
presenting a particularly interesting tumor.
"Sixty-two thousand dollars," Joan said. "Over three years. Give or take.
That's what I can prove so far, and I'm not done."
She turned her laptop around. A spreadsheet glowed — neat columns,
color-coded, damning in the way only spreadsheets could be.
"GreenLine Landscaping," Joan said, tapping the screen. "No-bid contract,
renewed three times. They're billing at roughly triple the market rate for this
area. I called four other companies for quotes on comparable properties.
GreenLine is charging for a level of service that would require,
conservatively, twice the crew hours they're actually deploying."
"How do you know the crew hours?" Tom asked.
"Because," Joan said, "your daughter takes photographs."
Chloe's photography — the hobby Tom had indulged with a used DSLR for
her eleventh birthday — had become, without anyone intending it, a forensic
archive. She shot the neighborhood the way twelve-year-olds shoot
everything: constantly, indiscriminately, timestamped by the camera's own
metadata. Joan had subpoenaed Chloe's photo library — with Tom's
permission and Chloe's solemn, thrilled cooperation — and matched it
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against GreenLine's invoices.
"Invoice dated March 14th," Joan said, pulling up a photo. "Billed for full
mowing, edging, and hedge trimming of the north common area." The photo
showed the north common area on March 14th: shaggy grass, untrimmed
hedges, a fallen branch lying exactly where it had fallen. "Invoice dated
March 21st. Same." Another photo: same branch, same shaggy grass. "They
billed for eleven weeks of work in the spring quarter. Chloe's photos show
the work was performed in, at most, four of them."
Tom stared at the screen. "She photographed a crime scene for three months
and didn't know it."
"She photographed her neighborhood," Joan said. "The crime scene is my
interpretation."
Then there were the consulting fees. Twelve hundred dollars a month, every
month, for three years, paid to Diane Holloway personally, categorized in the
books as "community liaison consulting." No contract. No scope of work. No
deliverables. Just a monthly transfer from the HOA operating account to
Diane's personal checking account, authorized by Diane's own signature as
president.
"And then," Joan said, "there's the truck."
Doug Raines had bought a new pickup eighteen months ago — a top-trim
diesel, cash — and a bass boat six months after that, also cash. Doug owned
GreenLine Landscaping, the no-bid contractor. His sister was the HOA
president who awarded the contract. His tax returns showed a business
clearing maybe sixty thousand a year. The truck and the boat together cost
more than that.
"The money went HOA to GreenLine to Doug to Diane," Joan said. "Or
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HOA to Diane directly. Either way, it ended up in the same family. I've