The answers were careful enough to avoid direct admissions and vague enough to reveal the emptiness of the system.
During a break Mason spoke with Priya in the corridor.
“He’s going to say he assumed everything,” Mason said.
“Maybe he did,” Priya replied.
“Then responsibility has to be traced through the records.”
Lena joined them and admitted that hearing Gregory discuss her mother’s name had been harder than she expected.
She asked Mason not to tell her to be strong.
He told her she was allowed to be furious without doing anything dramatic about it.
Lena breathed out and leaned against the wall.
When the hearing resumed, Gregory was shown an internal note instructing staff to stop contacting former cooperative members directly.
He acknowledged that the note bore his initials.
Asked why he approved it, he said Warren wanted all communications routed through counsel.
The lawyer asked whether that rule also applied when someone was trying to collect an unpaid distribution.
Gregory hesitated.
He said he did not recall any exception.
The committee did not obtain the confession the headlines had promised.
It obtained something more useful: a documented pattern of decisions that could be compared with bank records and beneficiary letters.
Afterward Lena asked Mason whether the hearing had changed his opinion of Gregory.
Mason answered that he had stopped thinking of the case as one bad man hiding all the papers.
He saw a chain of people making small choices to avoid responsibility, each choice making the next one easier.
Lena nodded.
“That sounds more like what happened to my family,” she said.
They walked out of the courthouse together without speaking to the cameras.
Chapter 37: One Honest Invoice
Priya’s review uncovered an invoice that initially looked irrelevant.
It billed Northport Civic Trust for archiving services provided by a company that had gone out of business before the invoice date.
The amount was small compared with the disputed property proceeds.
Mason asked whether it could still matter.
Priya explained that an invoice with a false vendor date could help identify who prepared a batch of records after the fact.
She traced the invoice number to a series of entries that had been created in one weekend.
Several entries referenced old mailing addresses and returned distributions.
The committee’s lawyer requested the underlying emails and payment approvals.
Warren’s attorneys objected to the scope of the request.
The judge permitted limited discovery focused on the disputed transfers.
Mason watched the proceedings and learned the language of proportionality, relevance, and privilege.
