Yeah, Marcus said. Welcome to 5 years ago for me. He didn't it cruelly. He said it didn't say it cruelly. Said it the way a person says something when they need you to fully inhabit a reality before you can understand why certain decisions the way they have to be made.
What do we do? she asked. We go to someone outside the building and outside the company, he said. Someone with actual authority to act on what we have. Federal level. Not city.
The city oversight committee has been receiving falsified reports, which means either they didn't look hard enough or someone there is also compromised. Federal Housing Authority or directly to a US Attorney's Office. If I go to federal investigators, she said, it goes public. The company The company has been committing federal fraud for 6 years, Marcus said. Evelyn, the company, your company, that train has already left the station.
The question right now isn't whether this becomes public, it's whether you get in front of it or it runs you over. She heard him. She heard everything he wasn't saying, too. The memory of a woman who didn't have to die the way she died living in the space between his sentences, present in every word he chose and every word he held back. "Okay," she said.
"Can you get out of the building with those records in the next hour?" he asked. "Yes." "Then do it now," he said, "and call me when you're out." She closed the laptop.
She looked at the room around her, the framed awards on the walls, the city view through the window, the name plate on the desk that said Evelyn Brooks, CEO. She'd built this. Not all of it. She'd taken the reins of a company her father had started, but she'd grown it, shaped it, made it into something she'd been proud of. She'd been proud of it.
She picked up the secured drive. She put it in her bag. She walked out. Behind her, in the executive suite of Brooks Urban Living, on the 14th floor of a glass building on Peachtree Street, the city of Atlanta was waking up in the gray morning light. And neither she nor Marcus Carter knew yet how much worse it was going to get before it got better, but they were both, for the first time, moving in the same direction.
And somewhere in that building, Gerald Pruitt was arriving for the day, setting his briefcase down, turning on his monitor, and beginning his morning the way he'd begun every morning for the past 6 years, with no idea that the window had just closed. Evelyn called him at 7:42 in the morning. She was out of the building. She said it fast, the way people say things when they've been holding their breath and finally remembered they're allowed to exhale. Marcus was in the Marta maintenance lot, already 40 minutes into his shift, when his phone buzzed in his chest pocket.
He stepped away from the engine bay, wiped his hands on a shop rag, and answered without checking the screen, because there was only one person who had that number who would be calling before 8:00 in the morning. "I'm out," she said. "Where are you?" "My car. Personal car, not a company vehicle.
Parked on Auburn Avenue." "Good," he said. "Stay there. Don't drive yet. I need you to do something before you go anywhere.