"Yes, sir," Grant said. "I'm sorry."
Odessa had been watching him the whole time. It was a decent confession. It was, she thought, more than a lot of men would have managed. She was a little surprised by it, and she let herself be surprised, because she had spent twenty-nine years watching boys who threw things on the bus grow up into men who coached Little League, and she knew people could turn.
But she also knew the difference between a boy who confessed to the spitball and a boy who confessed to the spitball so nobody would ask about the fire alarm.
"Miss Moreau," she said. "You've been reading those files, too?"
Tasha's knuckles went paler. Lorraine looked at her, then at Odessa, then nodded. "Go ahead, Tasha."
"I — yes, ma'am." Tasha opened the top file. Her voice shook for the first sentence and then, as she got into the numbers, it steadied, the way Odessa had known it would. "Mr. Whitfield's right about the instructions. They're on every desktop order north of the interstate, going back to at least when I can see. But there's something else." She turned a page. "Out of these twenty-three, nineteen were desktop appraisals. Four weren't. Four had full interior walkthroughs, because the applicants asked for them and paid for them themselves, out of pocket, four hundred and fifty dollars each. And all four of those came back at values that would have qualified. Easily. The Guillory house came back at ninety-one thousand."
"Then why was it declined?" Lorraine said.
"Because the walkthrough was overridden," said Tasha. "There's a form. A value reconciliation. When a branch manager thinks an appraisal is wrong, he can request a review, and the review can use different comparables. In all four, the review was requested from the branch. And in all four, the review used post-storm comps within one mile." She turned the file around and slid it down the table toward Lorraine and pointed. "The request was signed here. And here. And on my grandmother's file, the second time, here." She swallowed. "That one was after I started working at the branch. I didn't know until last night."
The room was very quiet.
Lorraine Thibodeaux put on her reading glasses. She read the form. She turned to the next file and read that form, and the next, and the next. Nobody said anything. Out in the lobby a child was asking for a lollipop.
"Grant," Lorraine said finally, without looking up. "You didn't mention these."
"I —" He had gone a dull, mottled red. "Lorraine, those were judgment calls. The walkthroughs were — the applicants chose the appraisers, they could have been —"
"Licensed appraisers," Tasha said quietly. "From the bank's approved list. I checked."
"There's a word for a judgment call you only make in one direction," Odessa said. She wasn't angry. She had decided that on the drive over, with Alcide beside her humming along to the radio. She had been angry for a month, counting tarps, and she had found that