Chapter 4 - The Dallas Panic
I listened to Marjorie Kessler sob uncontrollably through the speakerphone of my father's desk.
She was currently trapped in a luxury Dallas boutique, deeply humiliated because all seven of her black credit cards had just been declined.
The Kessler family name, which she had spent her entire life fiercely protecting, was suddenly entirely worthless.
Warren Bellamy let her cry for a full minute before calmly hanging up the phone without saying a single word.
He turned to me and stated that fear was always the best tool for breaking a proud family.
I sat in the leather chair, feeling a strange mix of absolute power and profound sadness.
Nolan entered the study holding a stack of freshly printed satellite surveillance photos.
He placed them on the desk, pointing to a dark sedan parked outside the Dallas hospital where I had been treated.
The man sitting in the driver's seat of the sedan was the head of the security team that had broken my ribs.
Nolan explained that the man had not fled the city as expected, but was instead waiting for someone.
A second photo showed Tessa slipping out of the hospital's back exit and getting into the passenger side of that exact sedan.
Tessa was secretly colluding with the very men who had brutally assaulted me on the staircase.
I realized the entire violent incident at the mansion had been completely premeditated.
Tessa hadn't just faked a fall to get me out of the house; she had orchestrated an assassination attempt.
The forty million dollar check wasn't hush money for a domestic dispute.
It was Reid's desperate attempt to cover up a botched murder plot before the authorities got involved.
I asked Nolan to trace the financial accounts belonging to the security guards.
He tapped a few keys on his laptop and brought up a hidden offshore account in the Cayman Islands.
A massive wire transfer of five million dollars had been deposited into the guard's account exactly three days before Marjorie's birthday dinner.
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The authorization signature on the wire transfer did not belong to Tessa or Reid.
It belonged to Marjorie Kessler, the woman who had claimed I was embarrassing the family.
