Chapter 7 - The Sister’s Betrayal
While Beatrice was weeping in the parking lot of the Silver Saddle Diner, my burner phone buzzed again.
A text message.
*David, please. Don't let Mom know I’m texting you. Tyler has a second ledger. I know where it is. Please don't let me go to prison. —Chloe.*
I stared at the screen, standing in the cold pre-dawn air outside the diner.
Chloe. My younger sister. She had been nineteen when I deployed for my first tour in Iraq. I had paid her entire college tuition out of my combat bonuses. When she dropped out after two semesters to pursue an "influencer career" in Los Angeles, I had bought her a condominium and covered her living expenses until she burned through three hundred thousand dollars of my money.
She had always been weak, vain, and pathologically selfish. But unlike Beatrice, who was a calculated sociopath, Chloe was a coward. And cowards always turn on each other when the ship starts taking on water.
I dialed her number immediately. She picked up on the first ring, her breath ragged.
"David?"
"Where are you?"
"I’m in the basement of the mansion," she whispered, her voice echoing faintly against concrete. "Tyler has a private safe bolted into the floor behind the wine cellar rack. He thought I didn't know the combination. But I saw him open it last month when he was drunk."
"What's in the safe, Chloe?"
"The hardware key," she sobbed. "The encrypted USB drive for the Vance Horizon offshore accounts. And the original paper stock certificates for Mercer-Vance Logistics. The ones with your real signature from 2018!"
My jaw tightened. "Why does he have the originals?"
"Because the merger lawyers at Apex demanded to see the physical certificates before the wire transfer executes!" Chloe explained, the words tumbling out in a panic. "Tyler couldn't use the forged scans for the final closing audit. He hired a documents expert in New York to chemically wash your signature off the physical stock certificates and replace it with Beatrice’s power-of-attorney endorsement! The courier brought them yesterday afternoon! Tyler left them in the floor safe until the morning meeting!"
"Chloe," I said, my voice commanding and absolute. "Listen to me very carefully. If you want to spend the next twenty years outside of a federal penitentiary, you do exactly what I tell you."
"Anything, David! I swear! I’m so sorry about Elena... I told Mom it was wrong! I told her Julian looked sick, but she took my car keys and threatened to throw me out on the street!"
"Save the performance for the judge, Chloe," I cut her off cold. "Open the safe. Take the USB drive and the stock certificates. Do not touch anything else. Do not leave the house. Marcus Diaz is pulling up to the front gate in three minutes. You will hand the documents to him through the passenger window."
"And... and then what?" she cried. "What happens to me?"
"You sit in that empty house and you wait for the state troopers," I said. "And if you try to run, Chloe, I will tell the district attorney to seek the maximum sentence for felony child abuse and false imprisonment."
I hung up without waiting for an answer.
I got back into my rental car and keyed Marcus’s direct radio line. "Marcus. Target package is at the estate. The sister is turning state’s evidence. She’s retrieving the physical stock certificates and the Vance Horizon hardware key from a safe in the wine cellar."
*"Copy that,"* Marcus replied over the encrypted speaker. *"I’m two blocks out. What about Tyler?"*
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"Tyler is heading downtown to his corporate penthouse to prep for the nine o'clock signing," I said, putting the car in gear and hitting the accelerator. "He thinks he has all the leverage. Let’s make sure he walks into that boardroom completely blind."
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