Chapter 3 - Follow the Money
Victor’s high-priced defense attorney, a shark named Harrison Vance, managed to get him out on a staggering five-million-dollar bail by claiming the evidence was circumstantial. But I didn't care. Being out on bail only gave Victor enough rope to hang himself, and I was going to provide the gallows.
I spent the next seventy-two hours locked in the SBI cyber lab, my eyes burning from the glow of three monitors. Elise had come from money—our grandfather had established a massive trust for us—but Victor had always portrayed himself as a self-made real estate mogul. It was a lie.
I dug through layers of encrypted offshore accounts, shell companies, and dummy corporations. Victor wasn't a mogul; he was a gambler playing with other people's lives. His real estate empire was heavily leveraged, teetering on the edge of complete bankruptcy.
At 3:00 AM on a Tuesday, I finally found the smoking gun.
A hidden folder on a server routed through the Cayman Islands. It contained life insurance policies. Three months before Elise became pregnant, Victor had taken out a secondary, massive policy on her life. The payout was thirty million dollars. The clause was specific: the payout would double in the event of an accidental death.
But there was something else. A series of wire transfers, each for fifty thousand dollars, sent to a private clinic in Switzerland.
I leaned closer to the screen, my heart pounding against my ribs. I ran the account numbers. They belonged to a research chemist.
I grabbed my phone and dialed Captain Reyes, ignoring the late hour. “Captain. We need to exhume Elise’s body. Now.”
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“Clara, it’s three in the morning, what are you—”
“It wasn't just the brakes, Reyes. The brakes were the insurance policy to make sure the crash was fatal. He was poisoning her. He was inducing premature labor to stress her system before the crash.”
