But truth isn't the point. The point is to trigger concern among your limited partners and bury you in enough noise that you can't move effectively while Braden finds replacement funding. She paused. He has approximately 30 days before the project's financing window closes without a major capital partner. That is your timeline.
Elena closed her eyes for exactly 2 seconds, then opened them. Why are you telling me this? She asked. Lenora was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had changed just slightly.
The precision was still there, but underneath it was something that sounded like exhaustion. Like a woman who had watched something go wrong for years and had finally decided she was done watching. Because I raised him, she said, "And I know exactly what he is. " She stopped. And because you walked out of that boardroom with your head up, most people don't. The line went quiet.
Elena lowered the phone. She stood in the marble alcove and let the full weight of it settle over her. Not just what had happened upstairs, not just the snub or the laughter or the seat they'd put her in, but the 12,000 people who didn't know yet, who were going about their Tuesday morning without any idea that their streets were on a demolition list. She handed the phone back to Mattie. "Get Olivia on the phone," she said.
Her voice was steady, decided. "And find out who Reverend Odinwald is. " She pushed through the revolving door into the cold Chicago afternoon without looking back. The hotel suite smelled like coffee and urgency. By 6:00 that evening, Elena had changed out of the red dress and into something she could actually work in. Dark slacks, a simple black sweater, her hair pulled back.
The mahogany desk in the corner of the suite was buried under printed documents, open laptops, and the remnants of a room service order neither she nor Mattie had properly eaten. Olivia Sarsson joined by video call at 6:15. She appeared on the laptop screen the way she always did. No preamble, reading glasses already on, a notepad open beside her keyboard. Olivia was 61 years old and had spent two decades at the IRS before Elena hired her away with a salary the federal government couldn't match and work that actually kept her interested.
She had the specific unhurried focus of someone who had spent her entire career finding things that other people had tried very hard to hide. "Talk to me," Olivia said. Elena talked all of it. The boardroom, the handshake, the withdrawal, Lenora's call, the 12,000 residents, the commission deals, the fraud rumor being prepared. She didn't editorialize.
She laid it out clean and let Olivia absorb it. Olivia didn't interrupt. When Elena finished, she was quiet for a moment, clicking her pen slowly against her notepad. Shell companies, she said finally. That's where it'll be.
If he's routing payments to city officials, he's not doing it from the main HMG accounts. Too visible. He'll have layered it. She was already typing. Give me 2 hours.
It took her 90 minutes. Got something? Olivia said, her voice sharpening the way it did when a thread pulled clean. Three vendor contracts inside Meridian Rising's project documentation. Community outreach firms listed as providing resident engagement services.