“He said…follow the stink. It always leads to the dead body. So I started digging into the subs.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp. “Please tell me no one’s buried under one of those lots.”
“Doubtful, but Vance Brennan could be—likely is—robbing Pippin Development Group blind.”
“What? How?”
“With the help of some second-rate sub that he’s probably scammed with before. There’s nothing about Brennan on the internet and Pippin hired him for this project.”
“What else did you find?” she asked, a little horrified.
“I stopped to go to PT, but you want to dig with me?”
For the next hour, they sat side by side at her desk, close enough that they frequently touched—which she was not thinking about—tracing the pattern that Connor had been watching take shape for weeks.
Every change order. Every contractor recommendation. Every time Vance had steered work away from the approved vendor list and toward his three pet companies.
Only twice had he let the job go to another company, and they were both for invoices under two grand. The big ones were all going to his “preferred vendors.”
The picture that emerged was methodical and damning. Vance wasn’t just recommending vendors he liked. He was funneling work to connected companies that were bidding just under budget—which meant someone was feeding them internal numbers before the request for bids went out.
And the only person with access to both the budget allocations and the contractor pipeline was Vance Brennan.
“The HVAC specs,” Meredith said suddenly, sitting up straight.
“What about them?”
“In the Alastair, I spec’d twenty-gauge galvanized steel ductwork for all Phase One residences. It’s in the architectural plans, the mechanical drawings, everything. But if Bayside Mechanical is cutting corners to pad margins…” She stood. “We need to go look at the model.”
“Now?”
“Right now. If the ductwork in the Alastair is a different gauge than what I specified—if they installed something cheaper and billed for what was on the plans—that’s not just fraud. That’s a building code violation. And it’s my name on those blueprints.”
Connor stood up. “Let’s go.”
The Alastair modelsat at the front of Lakeside’s Phase One, its frame rising against a sky that was shifting from gold to copper as the sun dropped toward the tree line.
The construction crew had left, so the site was quiet—no trucks, no compressors, no shouted instructions over the whineof power tools. Just the skeletons of a few houses, and some foundations, all surrounded by red dirt and the beginnings of what would someday be a street.
Meredith ducked under the caution tape at the front entrance—there was no door yet, just a framed opening—and stepped onto the plywood subfloor. The house smelled like fresh lumber and concrete and the faint chemical tang of drywall compound. Sheets of drywall were stacked against the far wall, airing out. Electrical wires hung from the ceiling joists like loose threads, and PVC plumbing stubs jutted from the slab in the kitchen and bathrooms.
And overhead, running between the roof trusses—the ductwork.
Connor followed her in. “What are we looking for?”
“Gauge markings.” She pointed at the nearest run of silver ductwork. “Should be stamped on the metal. Twenty-gauge galvanized will say 20 GA somewhere on the surface. You might have to feel for it.”
Connor grabbed a stepladder the crew had left behind, positioned it under the main trunk line, and climbed up. The light was fading, so he used his phone flashlight in one hand, running the beam along the surface of the duct.
“Got it,” he said, bending a little to see the awkward placement of the stamp. “Twenty-four gauge,” he read. “Higher than twenty. Is that?—”
“Not good,” she said on a grunt. “The higher the number, the thinner the metal. That’s four gauges lighter than what I specified. Thinner metal, cheaper material, less durable. In a hurricane zone? The difference matters.”
He climbed down and looked at her. “They installed cheaper ductwork and they’re billing Pippin Lake for the more expensive level. That’s the margin. That’s where the money goes, as longas he has the sub in his pocket—all the subs. Bayside, Hawke, all the hand-picked Vance favorites.”
“Wethink,” she corrected. “We suspect. That’s not enough to accuse.”
Connor was quiet as he put the stepladder back in place. “So we have the bid pattern, the shared addresses, and now a physical discrepancy between specs and installation.”
