And then deliberately he set it aside, not because it wasn't warranted, because it wasn't useful yet, and his mother had not built what she built so that her son could let his anger get in front of the truth. "Tell me what you know," Ryan said. "All of it from the beginning." Puit looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at Jackson, who had come around the other side of the truck and was standing back, giving Ryan the space, present but not crowding.
Then Puit nodded, the nod of a man accepting something he's been running from. And he said, "Your father was the best man I ever worked with. I want you to know that first before anything else." Daniel Carter was honest in a way that the rest of us at that firm had learned not to be. and it cost him everything and I am going to have to live with what I did and what I didn't do for whatever time I have left. Ryan said nothing.
He waited. Puit started talking. Daniel Carter had come to Puit in the spring of 2002. He'd been at Meridian for 2 years by then, working the community forward account, processing dispersements, running the standard reconciliation work that banking liaison firms do. and he'd found something wrong. He'd found the shell companies, not all of them, not at first, just two of them.
And he'd traced a transaction that should have gone to a family assistance grant in Rutherford County and instead had moved through a company called Bridgeway Solutions that didn't appear to have any actual business operations and from there into an account that connectedly to a Hail Property Group subsidiary. He'd come to Puit because Puit was his supervisor. Because Puit was Gerald Hail's son's business partner, effectively with a relationship to the Hail family going back two generations, which meant Puit was in theory the person with the most power to do something about what Daniel had found. What Daniel hadn't known was that Puit already knew, had known for 3 years. Puit stopped at that point in the telling and looked at Ryan and said, "I need you to understand that I'm not going to try to justify it.
I'm going to tell you exactly what happened and exactly why I made the decisions I made, and I'm not going to insult you by pretending any of it was right." Ryan said, "Keep going." Puit had known because Gerald Puit, his own father, had set up the banking structure, had designed the Shell Company network, had built the laundering mechanism with Hail's full knowledge and cooperation. The two of them had been partners in it from the start, and Derek Puit, who had joined the firm at 23 and had found out at 28 what the firm was really doing, had faced a choice that he'd handled in the worst possible way. He'd done nothing.
He told himself it wasn't his business. He told himself the amounts were too large for him to fight. He told himself that Hail and his father were connected to too many powerful people for anyone to touch them. He told himself a lot of things and none of them were were true and he'd known it at the time. When Daniel came to him with the evidence he'd found, Puit had panicked.
He told Daniel he would look into it. He'd told him to keep quiet while he investigated internally. He'd told him to trust the process. And then he'd called Gerald Hail and told him what Daniel had found. The silence that followed that sentence had a physical quality.
Ryan felt it in his chest, not shock, because he'd been building toward this understanding for 2 days. But the confirmation of it, the arrival of the thing he'd suspected, landed differently than the suspicion had. You told Hail, Ryan said. Yes, Puit said. You told him my father had found the evidence.
Yes. And 6 weeks later, my father was dead. Puit's face was terrible to look at. Not because it was composed or defended or hiding anything. Because it was completely open, completely exposed the face of someone who's been carrying the full weight of something unforgivable and has finally set it down in front of the person who has the most right to see it.
Yes. Puit said. Ryan was quiet for a long moment beside him. Jackson didn't move, didn't speak, didn't interfere. He'd understood from the moment they arrived what this conversation needed to be, and he was doing the hardest thing, which was nothing.
And my mother, Ryan said, Emily came to me after Daniel died. Puit said his voice had gone flat, scraped clean of everything except the facts, because the facts were all that was left. She knew I'd been Daniel's supervisor. She came to me and she said she needed to understand what Daniel had been working on. She was she was so careful.
She didn't accuse me of anything. She just asked questions and I could see in her face that she already knew more than she was saying. He stopped, swallowed. I should have told her everything right then. I should have helped her, but I was so afraid of what Hail would do if he found out.
I'd talk that and I told her almost nothing. I told her Daniel's death was an accident and that there was nothing suspicious about his work. He looked at Ryan and then she looked at me with those green eyes and she said, "I know you're lying, Mr. Puit, and I know you know what happened to Daniel and I'm going to find out the truth whether you help me or not." And she left. Ryan closed his eyes for one second.
"Open them. She found it on her own." He said, "She was already collecting evidence when she came to me." Puit said, "She'd been doing it for months. She was smarter than any of us gave her credit for.
Smarter than Hail gave her credit for." His voice broke slightly on the last sentence, and he let it break. Didn't try to cover it. He didn't think a Grant's administrator would understand what she was looking at. He underestimated her completely.
And by the time he realized what she'd actually assembled, "It was too late to stop her gathering it," Ryan said. He couldn't get back what she'd already documented, Puit said. So, he stopped her instead. The three of them, Ryan, Jackson, Puit, stood in the parking lot of a gas station off I40, and the weight of 21 years of buried truth lay between them like something finally excavated, ugly and necessary in equal measure. Why now?
Jackson said his first words since they'd arrived. Quiet, direct, no accusation in them, but no gentleness either. Why call today? Why not 5 years ago or 10 years ago or the day after Daniel died? Puit looked it at him.
Because I was a coward, he said, "And because I had a son. And because I told myself every year that the risk was too high and the outcome was too uncertain, and there were a hundred reasons not ta." He stopped, took a breath, and because this morning I found out my father is dying. He's in a hospice in Brentwood. He has maybe three weeks.
He looked at Ryan and I realized that I could couldn't let him die without it mattering. Without this mattering, I can't. I watched your father die and your mother die. And I stayed quiet for 21 years, and I cannot let my father die and let it all just stay buried. His voice had gone rough.
I know that's not about you. I know my reasons for doing the right thing shouldn't be about me, but they are partly and I'm telling you that because you deserve the honest version. Ryan looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "Are you willing to tell investigators everything you just told me?" "Yes," Puit said without hesitation.