Chapter 5 - The Phantom Trust
I was officially a wanted fugitive running from the very people who were supposed to help me.
I threw my compromised cell phone into a nearby storm drain to prevent them from tracking my location.
I walked through the pouring rain for two hours until I reached the rundown office of an old college friend named Sarah.
Sarah was a brilliant forensic accountant who owed me a massive favor from our university days.
I pounded on her frosted glass door until she finally opened it, looking completely terrified.
"Caleb, your face is plastered on every single news channel right now," she whispered, pulling me inside.
I quickly explained everything about the shed, the poison, and Marcus's unthinkable betrayal.
Sarah immediately locked the deadbolts and booted up her encrypted laptop on her messy desk.
"If your father is truly alive and working with Marcus, they have to be moving the money somewhere," Sarah said.
She spent the next hour aggressively hacking into Marcus's offshore banking routes.
She finally broke through a heavily encrypted firewall and gasped at the massive numbers on the screen.
"They didn't just steal from your company, Caleb," she explained, her voice trembling.
"They are trying to liquidate a massive, century-old family trust fund."
I stared at the screen, completely unaware that such a massive fortune even existed in my family.
"The trust stipulates that it only pays out if the primary heir has a child," Sarah continued reading.
That was the terrifying puzzle piece that finally made everything make sense.
My mother didn't want Maya dead immediately.
She needed the baby to be born to trigger the massive financial payout, and then she planned to eliminate both of us.
"We have to warn the hospital," I told Sarah urgently.
Before she could pick up her desk phone, the heavy wooden door to her office violently splintered open.
Three men in dark tactical gear stepped into the room, raising automatic rifles directly at our heads.
A tall man slowly walked in behind them, wearing a perfectly tailored suit.
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It was my supposedly dead father, smiling at me exactly the way my mother had smiled in the backyard.
"Hello, son," he said coldly, raising a silver pistol.
