Chapter 4 - The Dead End
The metallic smell of blood hit my senses before the shock fully registered.
Arthur Vance was dead, and the leather briefcase was completely gone.
I clamped a hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming.
My husband was no longer just a thief and a con artist.
He and his family were now directly tied to a brutal murder.
I knew instantly that if the police found me here, I would be the perfect suspect.
I was the angry wife, the defrauded victim, and the supposed CEO of the corrupt company Arthur was auditing.
I had to get out of that office immediately.
I carefully stepped around the spreading pool of blood, ensuring my shoes left no prints.
As I backed toward the door, I noticed a small, blinking red light under Arthur's desk.
It was a hidden external hard drive, kicked out of sight during the struggle.
I crouched down and grabbed the drive, praying it held the digital backups of the loan documents.
I sprinted back to Evelyn's car and drove recklessly through the empty night streets.
My phone buzzed in my pocket with an incoming text message.
It was from Eric.
"Hope you landed safely in Paris, darling. I miss you already."
The sheer sociopathic calmness of his message made my skin crawl.
I ignored the text to maintain the illusion that my phone was currently in airplane mode over the Atlantic.
I arrived back at Evelyn's house just as the sun began to rise over the Connecticut suburbs.
Evelyn was awake, pacing the kitchen with two mugs of black coffee.
I told her about the murder and tossed the encrypted hard drive onto the table.
"Eric is tying up loose ends," Evelyn said grimly.
"Arthur probably tried to blackmail them for a larger cut of the loan, so they silenced him."
"We need to see what is on this drive before the police identify the body," I said.
Evelyn plugged the drive into her secure laptop and ran a decryption software she had acquired from her nephew.
Lines of code rapidly scrolled across the screen for ten agonizing minutes.
Finally, a folder titled "Nebula Underwriting" popped open.
It contained thousands of emails, bank statements, and wire transfer logs.
But it was the final audio file in the folder that made my heart completely stop.
May you like
I clicked play, and Eric's frantic voice filled the kitchen.
"The brakes on her airport Uber didn't fail like you promised, Arthur," Eric hissed on the recording.
