Chapter 5
Vittorio did not answer Owen.
Instead, he spent the morning with Rachel and foundation finance director Mark Feldman.
Mark looked physically uncomfortable.
He had worked for Vittorio for eleven years.
“You approved some of these budgets.”
“Budgets aren’t invoices.”
“No.”
“Did you verify the vendors?”
Mark looked down.
“Owen handled documentation.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No.”
The admission sat between them.
Vittorio had built organizations where people were rewarded for speed and loyalty.
Not for telling him something he did not want to hear.
Claire had apparently learned that before he had.
They compared Northline invoices with bank transfers.
Some services had never occurred.
Others were heavily inflated.
Yet one detail complicated the obvious conclusion.
Claire’s signature appeared on four payment approvals.
Vittorio stared at them.
“She signed these?”
Mark nodded.
“I assumed she knew.”
Rachel leaned forward.
“She didn’t.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I was with her when she found the first one.”
Rachel explained that Claire had been stunned to learn Northline was receiving foundation money.
Owen told her she had approved the vendor months earlier.
Claire denied it.
Then he produced paperwork bearing her signature.
“She thought somebody was forging her name?”
“At first.”
Vittorio looked back at the approvals.
The signatures looked real.
Rachel reached into the box.
“Then she started keeping copies of everything she signed.”
There were dozens.
Board acknowledgments.
Grant approvals.
Vendor renewals.
The four questionable Northline authorizations were not among them.
Vittorio’s phone buzzed repeatedly.
Bianca.
Owen.
Board members.
A donor.
He ignored them.
“What happened after Claire started keeping copies?”
Rachel’s mouth tightened.
“She stopped trusting Bianca.”
That answer hurt more than the invoices.
Bianca had been Vittorio’s older sister.
She had practically raised him after their mother died.
Claire knew that.
“She told me Bianca was trying to make her look confused,” Rachel said.
“Because of chemotherapy?”
“Yes.”
Vittorio remembered Bianca using the same phrase the previous night.
Claire was sick.
A simple explanation.
A useful one.
Rachel gathered the papers.
“There’s something else you need to know.”
Vittorio looked up.
“The week Claire died, she asked me to prepare a board packet about Northline.”
“Where is it?”
May you like
Rachel shook her head.
“It disappeared before the meeting.”
