Marcus said, "The timing is," he thanked her. He hung up. He stared at the subcontractor bids on the desk in front of him and thought about what it meant that Randall Fitch, who had been the Phoenix Project's director of finance, who had signed off on every contractor payment Marcus had ever questioned, who had very specifically not been investigated when the kickback scheme came out, was now making calls to his current employer. He thought about what it meant that Diane had offered him this role, knowing Fitch was already asking questions. He thought about the beach, about her turning her head.
And then he did what he'd learned to do in Phoenix. He started building a system. He started writing things down. Dates, names, what Gail had said and went. The bid sheets in front of him suddenly looked different.
One of the contractors, a company called Pacific Ridge Build, had a name he'd seen before, not in Cambria. In a subcontractor ledger from a project four years back. He pulled up the old files he kept on an external drive. Found the name, sat back. Pacific Ridge build had been a sub under the Phoenix General Contractor, the one who'd run the kickback scheme.
He looked at the current bid. Pacific Ridge was bidding on the Cambria mechanical systems work. His phone was already in his hand when it bust. A text from an unsaved number. Stay in your lane, web.
You don't want another Phoenix. He screenshot it, added it to the file he was building. It was Thursday. He had until Friday to decide what to do with any of this. What he actually did was call his daughter.
"How was school?" He said when she picked up, "Dad," Lily said. It's 4:15. I'm not in school. I know. I meant earlier.
We did fractions, she said. They're annoying, but I get them. That's my girl. Are you coming home this weekend? Saturday morning?
He said, "I'll make pancakes with the chocolate chips." with the chocolate chips. She made a satisfied sound and handed the phone to his sister. And Marcus talked to Dana for a few minutes about nothing in particular. And by the time he hung up, he knew what he was going to do. Not because he'd figured out the whole situation because there was a 7-year-old waiting for pancakes.
And that made the math simple. He wasn't going to run. He wasn't going to pretend he hadn't seen what he'd seen. And he was going to tell Diane Callaway exactly what he'd found because she'd offered him this role knowing things he hadn't known she knew. And that meant she was either testing him or she was in trouble.
And either way, he wasn't going to be the person who stayed quiet about it twice. He drafted the email that night, attached the Pacific Ridge documentation, kept it factual, no editorializing. Subject line vendor conflict Cambria project, please advise. He did not mention the text. That went in a separate folder.