"Say that again," Marin said. "They want it to look like you." "Yes," she said quietly. "That's what I thought. I needed someone else to say it. Elliot leaned against the concrete pillar.
Then I have to ask you something, and I need a real answer. You have the resources to put six lawyers and a forensic firm on this by tomorrow morning. Why haven't you? 14 Million is a rounding error for this company. You could write a check and make the accusation itself irrelevant because $14 million is not the thing I'm afraid of losing, she said.
Then what is? I'm not going to tell you that yet, said Marin Callaway, and hung up. Elliot began where he always began, which was with the shape of a thing rather than its contents. He did not touch the treasury archive because access there was now monitored and because a controls manager suddenly reaching into cold storage would light up a dashboard somewhere. Instead, he did the most ordinary work in the world.
He ran a vendor validation review, the sort of routine hygiene exercise his group performed twice a year. And he simply made sure that Northstar Advisory Group fell inside the sample. Northstar had a registered address in Wilmington, Delaware, which turned out on inspection to be a fourth floor suite shared by 960 other entities, the corporate equivalent of a post office box with a lobby plant. It had no website beyond a single page with stock photography of a glass staircase. It had filed no employment tax registrations in any state.
Its officers were a registered agent and a manager listed only as a limited liability company in Nevada, which itself listed a manager in Wyoming. There was no evidence anywhere that Northstar Advisory Group had ever employed a human being or produced a single deliverable. And yet Callaway Meridian had paid it $14 million for strategic logistics consulting. That was interesting but not surprising. Shells were common and the money was too clean.
What stopped Elliot cold came on the second night when he stopped looking at the summary schedule. Conrad had prepared and went instead to the general ledger where the summary had come from and pulled the full transaction history against the vendor identification number rather than the vendor name. The relationship did not begin 3 years ago. It began seven. There were payments to Northstar Advisory Group, stretching back into a period when Marin Callaway had been running the company's Midwest distribution division out of a leased warehouse office in Joliet with no authority over corporate dispersements, no signing power above $200,000 and no seat at the executive.
Table. The payments started two full years before she became chief executive. He sat with that for a long moment. It broke the story. The entire theory Conrad Waywright was preparing to present to the board rested on a simple satisfying narrative.