Chapter 3 - The Paper Trail
By midnight, the barbecue had disintegrated into chaos. The deputies took statements from three cousins who were too terrified of perjury charges to lie for Mark. Ethan and I sat in the back of an ambulance while a paramedic cleaned his lip and documented the bruises on my wrist with a digital camera.
"You okay, sis?" Ethan asked quietly once the paramedic stepped away.
"Better than I’ve been in six years," I murmured, staring at the evidence bag containing my beer-soaked cardigan.
"He's going to bail out by sunrise," Ethan warned. "Diane has local judges on speed dial. You can't go back to the house."
"I don't plan to," I said, a grim smile touching my lips. "In fact, I'm counting on him going home."
Thirty minutes later, we were sitting in the home office of Arthur Vance—no relation to Mark, but rather the most ruthless forensic accountant and divorce attorney in the county. Arthur had been my late father’s closest friend. When Mark started demanding control of my father’s logistics company shares eighteen months ago, Arthur had quietly told me to keep my eyes open.
Arthur slid a thick manila folder across his polished mahogany desk. "The preliminary audit is complete, Claire. It’s worse than we thought—which means it’s much better for us."
Ethan leaned forward. "What did he do?"
"Three weeks ago, Mark executed an unauthorized transfer of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars out of Claire’s inherited trust fund," Arthur explained, tapping a printed bank ledger. "He used a forged power of attorney. He routed two hundred thousand directly into Diane’s failing boutique in downtown Richmond to keep her out of bankruptcy, and the remaining two hundred and twenty thousand went toward the purchase of a luxury condo in Miami."
My chest tightened. "A condo? Why Miami?"
Arthur flipped a glossy photograph across the table. It showed Mark outside a waterfront restaurant in South Beach, his arm draped possessively around a sleek brunette with oversized designer sunglasses.
"Her name is Chloe Reynolds," Arthur said calmly. "She’s a junior marketing director at his firm. They’ve been leasing that condo under a shell corporation Mark formed two months ago. He thought routing the funds through three different domestic LLCs would make it impossible to track before the final divorce proceedings."
"He was planning to bleed me dry and abandon me," I whispered, the final remnants of any lingering grief turning to ash.
"Precisely," Arthur nodded. "Except he made one fatal mistake. The trust fund has a clause written by your father. Any unauthorized transfer triggers an immediate freeze and a mandatory fraud report to the state financial crimes division. I filed the injunction an hour before Mark poured that beer on your head."
Ethan let out a low whistle. "So the money Diane thinks saved her store..."
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"Is already locked," Arthur smiled coldly. "The checks she wrote to her suppliers this week will bounce by nine o'clock tomorrow morning."
***
