Chapter 75: Proffer

Miller’s office had booked the same annex room as before, the one with the long table and the window that looked onto a parking structure. Someone had put out a carafe of water and six paper cups. Nobody touched them.

Lucas got there at nine forty with Reed. Morgan was already seated at the far end with two binders and a laptop she had not opened. Miller came in at nine fifty with a legal pad and a clerk who set up a recorder and left.

"Ground rules," Miller said, before she sat. "This is a proffer, not a deposition. Ms. Garrity’s counsel has a letter from my office. What she says today can’t be used against her directly, except to impeach her if she says something different later. Mr. Vintage is here because her counsel asked for it and I agreed. He is a witness. He doesn’t ask her questions. If he has something to say, he says it to Mr. Reed, and Mr. Reed decides whether I hear it."

"Understood," Lucas said.

"Good. I’d like that to be the last thing you say until she leaves."

Elena Garrity arrived at ten past ten with her lawyer, a heavyset man in his sixties named Neil Brandt who walked like his knees hurt and shook every hand in the room, including Lucas’s. Elena did not shake anyone’s. She wore a dark suit and no jewelry, and her hair was pulled back harder than Lucas remembered. She sat across from him without looking at him.

He looked at her.

[Target: Elena Garrity.]

[Target State: Frightened. Controlled. Rehearsed the first ten minutes; has not rehearsed the rest.]

[Truthfulness Estimate: High on facts already documented. Uncertain on her own role.]

He let the overlay fade and kept his face still.

Brandt did the first few minutes. His client had represented Richard Sterling in connection with the trust and the Harlan matter. She had withdrawn at six fifty the previous morning because continued representation would make her a witness. She was cooperating voluntarily. She understood the letter. Then he turned to her and said, "Go ahead, Elena," in the tone of a man who had told her the same thing in a car outside.

Elena folded her hands on the table.

"Sixteen days ago Richard came to my office with an envelope," she said. "Manila, nine by twelve, unsealed. He asked me to have it couriered to a residential address in Chadds Ford that afternoon, from the firm’s account, with a cover note on firm letterhead that said ’per our conversation.’ He wanted it to look like correspondence between counsel and a party."

"Did you look inside?" Miller asked.

"Yes."

"What was in it?"

"Six prints. Photographs of Ms. Sterling and Mr. Vintage outside Ms. Sterling’s building at night. Two of them on the sidewalk. Four in the lobby doorway." She said it in the same voice she would have used for a filing date. "Time stamps on the back in Richard’s handwriting."

Lucas did not move. He had known the photographs existed since the night of the Arlington signing. He had not known there were six, or that Richard had written on them.

"Whose address in Chadds Ford?" Miller asked.

"Philip Danner’s."

Reed’s pen stopped for half a second and then kept going. Morgan opened her laptop.

"For the record," Miller said, "who is Philip Danner?"

"An independent director of Vertex Management. He’s been on the board for nine years. He chairs the audit committee." Elena paused. "Which means he oversees the company’s internal review of the altered document. Page forty-seven."

That was what Richard had meant, Lucas thought. Mr. Vintage would understand why. The man who would decide whether he got his badge back had been holding pictures of him in Victoria’s doorway for two weeks.

"Did you send it?" Miller asked.

"I sent the envelope. I didn’t send the note. I told Richard I wouldn’t put firm letterhead on it, and he said fine, a plain courier slip would do, Philip would know who it was from." Elena looked at her hands. "I should have refused the whole thing. I didn’t. The courier was billed to the firm’s account under the trust matter. The receipt is in the firm’s system. Neil has a copy."

Brandt slid a single sheet across to Miller. She read it and passed it to Morgan without comment.

"Do you know what Mr. Danner did with them?" Miller asked.

"I know he called Richard the next morning. Richard put him on speaker in my office. I don’t think he meant to. I think he wanted me to hear that he had a director."

"What did Mr. Danner say?"

Elena took a moment. It was the first time she had needed one.

"He said, ’I’ve received them. I’m not going to use them the way you’d like, but I’m not going to pretend I haven’t seen them.’ Richard asked him what that meant. Danner said it meant the board would have a conversation about judgment when the time was right, and that Richard should stop calling his house."

"Did Richard ask for anything specific?"

"He asked Danner to make sure the review of Mr. Vintage concluded with findings. That was the word he used. Findings. And to raise the photographs with the board if Victoria tried to bring Mr. Vintage back."

"And Danner’s answer?"

"He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He said, ’I’ll do my job,’ and hung up."

Miller wrote for a while. Morgan’s fingers moved on the laptop without much sound. Lucas watched Elena, and the overlay came back without him asking for it.

[Target State: Truthful on the call. Withholding: minor. She has not said why she agreed to the courier.]

He leaned slightly toward Reed and said, very low, "Ask why she sent it."

Reed considered that for a second, then wrote a word on his pad and turned it toward Miller. Miller read it.

"Why did you agree to send the envelope, Ms. Garrity?"

Brandt started to speak. Elena put two fingers on his sleeve, and he stopped.

"Because Richard was paying the firm’s bills on three matters," she said. "And because two days before that, he’d told me Victoria was going to sue the trust, and that when she did, everyone who’d worked on the Harlan filing would be in the complaint. Including me. He said it like he was doing me a favor by warning me." She looked up for the first time, not at Miller, but at Lucas. "I thought if I did what he asked, I’d stay on his side of the table. That’s the honest answer. It isn’t a good one."

Miller nodded once. She did not seem moved, and she did not seem unkind.

"Did Richard send photographs to anyone else on the Vertex board?"

"Not through me. I don’t know about anyone else."

"Did he send them to the press?"

"He talked about it. He didn’t, as far as I know. He said a director was more useful than a reporter, because a reporter publishes once and a director sits in every meeting."

That was the sentence Lucas would remember later. It was the most accurate thing anyone had said about Richard in a month.

The rest took another forty minutes. The Hartwell alias, which Elena admitted she had used to reserve the annex room the week before, because Richard had wanted to see who came and went. Two calls from Richard’s voip line to her mobile after his arrest, both unanswered. A text from Kaplan’s office on Monday night asking for the trust files, which Brandt had told her not to answer until today. Elena gave dates without looking at notes. When she didn’t know something, she said so.

At eleven twenty Miller put her pen down.

"That’s enough for now. Mr. Brandt, I’ll want her again next week. Ms. Garrity, if Mr. Danner or anyone acting for him contacts you, you call your lawyer and your lawyer calls me. Same day."

"He won’t," Elena said. "He doesn’t call people like me. He calls people like Victoria."

She stood. Brandt collected the letter and the receipt copy and put a hand on her back without quite touching it. At the door Elena stopped and turned around.

"Richard told me you’d understand why you needed to be here," she said to Lucas. "I wanted you to hear it in a room with a recorder. Not in a hallway. That’s all."

Then she left.

Nobody spoke until the elevator doors closed down the hall.

"Well," Miller said. "That’s a new name."

"Danner chairs the audit committee," Morgan said, reading off her screen. "Nine years on the board. He voted for Victoria’s appointment as CEO. He also voted for the Halcyon close. He’s on the compensation committee, which approved Cole’s contract terms." She scrolled. "No trading flags. No payments from the trust that I’ve seen. I’ll look harder."

"Receiving photographs isn’t a crime," Reed said.

"No," Miller said. "Keeping them while you supervise an internal review of a witness the sender is trying to discredit is something I want to understand before I decide what it is." She turned to Lucas. "Mr. Vintage. You’ve met him?"

"Twice," Lucas said. "Once at the Halcyon signing. He shook my hand and asked if I was the one who’d found the Harlan filing. Once at a quarterly meeting where I presented a slide. He asked one question about a footnote."

"Was he friendly?"

Lucas thought about it honestly. "Polite. He remembered my name the second time. Most of them didn’t."

Miller made a note.

"Here is where we are," she said. "I’m going to want to talk to Mr. Danner. I am not going to do that until I’ve seen the courier record from the firm and Morgan has gone through his board materials for the last six weeks. That’s days, not hours. Until then, nobody in this room says his name to anyone outside it." She looked at Reed. "That includes your client’s personal life."

"He knows," Reed said.

"I’d like to hear him say it."

"I won’t say it to her," Lucas said. "Or to anyone."

"Good." Miller stood and picked up her pad. "Then I’ll see you at the detention hearing Friday, Mr. Reed. Mr. Vintage, I won’t."

She left with Morgan. The clerk came back for the recorder. Reed sat for a while with his pad in front of him, looking at the name he had written at the top of it in block capitals and underlined twice.

"Danner was one of the people she called yesterday," Lucas said quietly. "When she told the board."

"She called the chair," Reed said. "The chair calls the directors. Yes. Danner heard about you from his own chairman yesterday, and he already had pictures of it." He capped his pen. "Which tells you something about what he was planning to do with them, if he’d been the one to break it."

"He’d have told the board she’d been sleeping with a contractor under investigation and hiding it."

"And she’d have lost the room for a year. Her phrase, not mine." Reed stood. "She got there first. She doesn’t know she did."

Lucas looked out at the parking structure. A man on the third level was trying to fold a stroller and losing.

[Priority Quest Progress.]

[Objective 1 of 2: Attend Elena Garrity’s proffer with counsel present. Complete.]

[Objective 2 of 2: Share nothing about the proffer with Victoria Sterling outside the presence of counsel. In Progress.]

[Current AP Balance: 4650.]

[Note: The second half of this quest has no duration listed.]

He noticed that last line and did not like it.

He went home at two. He did laundry because it was something to do with his hands. He cleaned the stovetop, which did not need it. At four his phone buzzed and he picked it up too fast.

It was Victoria.

Board chair says thank you for the two paragraphs. Apparently I’m the first CEO in his experience who disclosed something before a lawyer told her to. I’m choosing to take that as a compliment. How was your day?

He looked at it for a long time.

Quiet, he wrote. Did laundry. Cleaned a stove that was already clean.

That’s what people do when they’ve had a day that isn’t quiet.

He did not answer that. After a minute she sent another.

Never mind. I’m not asking. Separate paper. Still on for tomorrow?

Still on. Seven.

I’ll bring wine you can’t afford and pretend it’s from the corner store.

He put the phone face down on the counter and stood there with his hand on it. He thought about Philip Danner in a house in Chadds Ford opening a manila envelope and taking out six prints, then calling Richard the next morning to say he would do his job. He thought about Danner getting a call from the board chair yesterday and saying something sympathetic.

At five forty his laptop chimed with an email. Not to his personal address. To the Vertex contractor address that had been suspended along with his badge, which forwarded to his phone because nobody had turned the forwarding off.

From: Office of the General Counsel, Vertex Management

Re: Internal Review, Document Integrity Matter

Mr. Vintage, the Audit Committee requests that you attend an interview in connection with the internal review tomorrow, Thursday, at 3:00 PM, Conference Room 4A. Committee Chair Philip Danner will conduct the interview. You may be accompanied by counsel.

Lucas read it twice. Then he forwarded it to Reed without a word, and stood in his clean kitchen and waited for the phone to ring.

It rang eleven seconds later.