Read Chapter 10: The Missing Examiner

The ledger pages had been folded so many times the creases had gone soft, like cloth. Ruth had let him keep the Halcyon note—evidence, she'd called it, though of what exactly Walter was still trying to say. He sat at the farmhouse's warped kitchen table, the single kerosene lamp throwing his shadow long against the wall. Outside, wind rattled the loose tin siding, and somewhere in the back room Jack snored like a dying engine.

Ruth's words circled him. *Arthur Phelps had been chasing the same name.* The same shell company. The same pattern of dead loans and dying banks. And then he'd gone to meet her one evening in early April, and never arrived.

Walter turned the note over. Halcyon Mills. It was just a piece of paper with a signature and a series of numbers. But if Ruth was right—and she'd never once been wrong in all the years he'd apprenticed under her—it was the thread that pulled loose the whole tapestry.

"Can't sleep either?"

Walter looked up. Roy stood in the doorway, lean silhouette against the dark hall, a cigarette burning between his fingers. He moved without noise for a man his size.

"Just reading."

Roy walked over, pulled out the chair across from Walter, and sat. He didn't ask what Walter was reading. He just waited. That was Roy's way—patience like an anvil.

"I need to tell you something," Walter said. "About the examiner."

"Phelps." Roy said the name like it cost him nothing. "The one who disappeared."

Walter nodded slowly. "He wasn't just any examiner. He'd been tracking a pattern. Shell companies—Halcyon Mills is one of nine—buying up paper from failing banks, accelerating their collapse. Small banks in three states. All the same fingerprints."

Roy took a drag, watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling. "And you found this out how?"

"A bookkeeper I used to know. She worked the ledgers for half the banks in the county before the panic. She recognized the signature on the note from the Millbrook job."

Roy set the cigarette in the ashtray's groove. "So this Phelps, he was onto the same thing these shells are running. And now he's gone."

"Silenced," Walter said.

The word hung between them. Roy's face gave nothing away, but Walter watched his jaw shift, a small muscle ticking beneath the skin.

"You think someone killed him."

"I think a man who disappears right before he exposes a fraud that's murdering banks across three states didn't just decide to go fishing." Walter leaned forward. "Roy, this isn't just a couple of bad loans. Someone is deliberately collapsing institutions. Small towns. Pension funds. Families. It's coordinated. It's money moving through the shells, laundering losses, and then—"

"And then what?" Roy's voice was flat. "You're going to tell me there's a master ledger somewhere. That if we find it, it all comes crashing down."

Walter stopped. The way Roy said *master ledger*—like he'd heard the phrase before. Like he already knew.

"You know about it," Walter said slowly.

Roy picked up his cigarette again, tapped ash into the tray. "I know a lot of things, Walt. I know that banks fail. I know that men like Phelps ask questions and then one day don't show up to dinner. I know that if you dig too deep in this country, you find bodies instead of answers."

"Then you understand why I need to follow this."

Roy looked at him then, and the calm in his eyes was worse than anger. "You're not listening. I don't want to understand. I want to get paid."

Walter felt the floor shift beneath him. "This isn't just about money anymore. You saw what we did in Millbrook. That guard—"

"That guard was a risk we managed." Roy leaned back. "We're robbers, Walt. Not crusaders. We take what's in the till and we leave. The minute we start chasing conspiracies, we stop being smart and start being dead."

"Phelps didn't chase anything. He just did his job, and they took him for it."

Roy stood. The chair scraped against the floor, a sound too loud in the quiet house. "Phelps was a government man. He had badges and warrants and the whole weight of the treasury behind him. And they still got to him. What makes you think you'd fare better?"

Walter opened his mouth, but Roy cut him off.

"You found something in that bank. You kept it quiet. That was smart." Roy's voice dropped. "Keep it that way. Show the note to the rest of the crew, and you'll have questions. Questions get us split up. Split up gets us caught. You want to find your dead examiner, you do it alone and you do it without dragging my people into the hole with you."

Roy walked to the doorway, paused.

"I liked the Benning job. We had a plan. We followed it. We got out." He glanced back. "This—what you're carrying around in your head—it changes things. And I don't like changes I didn't authorize."

He left. Walter sat alone at the table, the ledger still open in front of him, the lamplight flickering as the wick burned low.

*He knew about the ledger.* Walter hadn't told Ruth's exact words about the master document Roy hadn't reacted, hadn't questioned it, even though Walter had never mentioned it. Which meant Roy already had a name in his head for the thing Phelps was looking for.

Walter reached into his coat and pulled out the folded letter he'd taken from the Millbrook files—the one he hadn't shown Ruth. It was a routing order, dated two weeks before the heist, addressed to a field office of the Federal Reserve. The signature line was too smudged to read, but the name typed above the signature was clear:

*J. DeVries.*

Walter had seen that name before, in the financial pages he'd read while waiting for his bank to fail. Julian DeVries. Director of the Federal Trust Bank of Chicago. A man whose reach was said to extend down through half the lending institutions in the Midwest.

The routing order instructed the Millbrook Savings and Loan to transfer its performing loan portfolio to a holding account under Halcyon Mills' name, effective the day before the bank examiner arrived.

The day before *Arthur Phelps* arrived.

Walter folded the letter and put it back in his coat. He no longer believed Phelps was merely missing.

The lamp sputtered and died, plunging the kitchen into darkness. Walter sat in the black, the weight of what he knew pressing down on him, and he thought of Ruth's parting words at her door.

*"You've got a talent for seeing through numbers, Walter. Most men look at a ledger and see arithmetic. You look and see the story. That's rare. That's dangerous. And if you're not careful, it'll get you killed just like it got Arthur killed."*

Outside, wind wrapped around the farmhouse like a hand closing into a fist.