Chapter 13: Forty Hours

I did not give Kendra Pruell a seat at my table.

I gave her a folding chair in the Tolbert Claims conference room, with Bev on one side of her and a legal pad on the other.

"One hour," I said. "Play me the worst one first."

Kendra put her phone on the table and her hand over her stomach.

Bev slid the phone toward herself and plugged it into the speaker.

The recording started with a clink of ice and a bedsheet moving.

Then Curtis's voice came out of the speaker, thick with sleep and wine.

"She'll sign anything if I cry first," he said. "Twenty years. I cry, she signs."

Bev's pen stopped moving.

"Play the next one," I said.

My voice sounded all right to me.

The second clip was from a car.

Curtis was talking on speaker to someone whose side of the call I could not hear.

"The pledge covers the whole program fund," he said. "Nobody counts it, Kendra. Lakeshore sends the quarterly statement to my office. I sign for it."

"That's the one," Kendra said quietly. "He took it as consulting fees. He told me it was a thank-you from the hospital."

"How much?"

"I've seen the ledger. I made the entries." She swallowed. "About two hundred thousand, over eighteen months."

Bev took off her reading glasses and set them on the table very gently.

"Those were Maureen's wires," Bev said.

"Yes."

"You booked them."

"I did," Kendra said. "He told me it was approved."

"And you believed that."

"I believed it because I wanted to," she said. "That's the truth, and it's not a good one."

I looked at her for a long time.

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