Chapter 10 - The Crown and the Ghost
I stared down at the white plastic hospital wristband lying inside the steel lockbox while the rain poured down around the burning ruins of the Lake Norman boathouse.
Every single move since Saturday night—even Evan's pathetic, weeping apology behind the glass of the Intensive Care Unit—had been a cold-blooded performance designed to send Adrian and me to Lake Norman just in time to be caught standing over the burned bodies of Megan Brooks and Marcus Vance while my husband flew away to the Cayman Islands with thirty-nine point five million dollars!
He left the hospital three hours ago, and his charter jet at Concord Regional is cleared for takeoff as soon as the squall line passes at eleven-forty-five, Adrian said, checking his watch at eleven-twenty as he spoke rapidly into his satellite phone to the Special Agent in Charge of the Charlotte FBI field office.
We are twelve minutes from Concord Regional by highway—Vance, get us to the tarmac before that plane leaves the ground!
Leaving Megan in the custody of the Davidson Sheriff's deputies and crime-scene investigators as our material witness to Marcus Vance's murder, Adrian, Vance, and I tore across the county line in the Maybach at ninety miles an hour.
When we smashed through the side security gate onto the rain-swept private aviation tarmac of Concord Regional Airport at eleven-thirty-eight, the twin jet engines of a white Gulfstream G280 were already whining at high pitch on the taxiway strip!
And walking briskly up the aluminum airstairs into the cabin—without a limp, without an orthopedic brace, wearing a dry navy cashmere coat and carrying a black leather briefcase in each hand—was my husband, Evan Whitmore.
Block the nose wheel!
Adrian commanded as Vance spun the six-thousand-pound armored Maybach directly across the centerline in front of the Gulfstream's nose cone while four unmarked FBI pursuit vehicles and three state police cruisers roared onto the tarmac behind us with blue strobes blazing!
Trapped on the aluminum stairs with nowhere to run and eight federal carbines aimed at his chest, Evan froze in the blinding glare of the Maybach's high beams.
When I stepped out of the passenger door into the wind and rain, holding up the fireproof titanium lockbox from the Lake Norman boathouse and the primary cryptographic key that had just reversed the entire thirty-nine-point-five-million-dollar Cayman transfer back into First Piedmont Bank, Evan's knees buckled beneath him.
He dropped both briefcases onto the wet tarmac, stumbled down the metal stairs, and fell onto his knees in the puddles six feet in front of me, weeping loudly as two FBI agents moved in with steel handcuffs.
Claire, please, you have to listen to me—Marcus had a gun at the lake house, it was self-defense, and Megan forced me into the whole scheme!
Evan sobbed, reaching desperately for my hands just as he had reached for them in the hospital.
Ten years, Claire, we were married for ten years—please tell them this was just a marital dispute, do not let them give me life in prison!
I looked down at the man whose cuff link I had fixed on Saturday night, feeling nothing but the quiet, exhilarating lightness of a woman who had finally walked out of a ten-year prison cell into the fresh air.
Ten years is a long accident, Evan, I said calmly as the FBI agents pulled his arms behind his back and locked the steel cuffs around his wrists, reading him his federal rights for murder, arson, and wire fraud.
And as you told me at the gala on Saturday night, I am separating business from personal issues.
By noon the next day, under a brilliant blue Carolina sky inside the soaring glass atrium of the sixty-story Cole Tower in Uptown Charlotte, two hundred reporters and Wall Street analysts stood applauding as Adrian Cole and I signed the four-hundred-million-dollar River District partnership agreement—with me standing at the podium as the sole hundred-percent owner and Chief Executive Officer of the newly renamed Sterling Development Group.
With Evan and Megan locked away in federal custody without bail, Patricia evicted and under investigation for my father's death, every stolen dollar restored to my accounts, and Adrian Cole looking down at me on stage with a warm, devoted pride that made every woman in the room catch her breath, I truly believed the war was over and my new life had finally begun.
That evening at seven o'clock, while Adrian stepped down to the lobby to see off the Governor, I walked into Adrian's private penthouse study to pour two glasses of champagne—and noticed that the hidden mahogany architectural cabinet behind his bookcase had been left ajar by his legal clerk, revealing a crimson file folder bearing my late father Arthur's original death certificate and the words PROJECT BLACKWATER - ORIGIN.
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With my heart suddenly pounding against my ribs, I pulled open the crimson folder and stared in utter horror at a high-resolution surveillance photograph taken two years ago on the exact afternoon my father died of heart failure: standing behind the River District warehouse handing Patricia Whitmore the brown glass vial of untraceable cardiac toxin was not Evan, and it was not Marcus Vance—it was Adrian Cole's supposedly estranged ex-wife, Celeste Cole, and standing right beside her in the shadow of the loading dock was Adrian's own trusted security chief, Vance.
Before I could take a single breath or drop the photograph, the steel security shutters of the sixtieth-floor penthouse slammed down over the glass walls, the heavy oak study door locked from the outside as Vance's cold voice spoke through the intercom telling me that Adrian's elevator had just been severed in the shaft, and my phone lit up with a live message from Celeste Cole: Congratulations on consolidating one hundred percent of the River District land deeds under one signature for me today, Claire—your father died because he refused to sell us that waterfront, and in five minutes the world will think grief drove you to jump from my ex-husband's balcony.
