Chapter 9 - The Fourth Name
The fourth name was Rebecca Sloan.
Vice president of compliance.
A woman whose entire job was supposedly preventing the crimes she'd helped conceal.
Rebecca had passed three internal investigations.
Now I knew why.
She had designed them.
We didn't confront her.
Federal investigators wanted her unaware.
For four days, I attended meetings as if nothing had changed.
Rebecca sat twelve feet from me.
She gave reports.
She discussed “organizational integrity.”
She even expressed sympathy over Vanessa.
“Elijah, you must feel terribly betrayed.”
I looked directly at her.
“You have no idea.”
She smiled.
Actually smiled.
On Friday, investigators executed warrants.
Rebecca attempted to delete files.
The system preserved them.
Among those files was the Phase Three plan.
It wasn't murder.
That mattered.
The truth was complicated enough without inventing something worse.
Phase Three was corporate destruction.
Once Vanessa gained authority through my supposed incapacity, Rebecca would approve disastrous transactions designed to collapse key divisions.
Grant-controlled companies would purchase assets cheaply.
Mercer Aerospace would be carved apart.
Thousands of employees could lose their jobs.
My father's life's work would become pieces on someone else's balance sheet.
That made the betrayal larger than me.
I gathered senior employees in the manufacturing facility where Dad had once worked alongside machinists.
I told them enough to stop rumors without compromising the investigation.
“We found wrongdoing,” I said. “We stopped it. Nobody gets to destroy what you've built here because they think a company belongs only to the people whose names are on the building.”
An older machinist named Sam raised his hand.
“Are our jobs safe?”
“Yes.”
That was the promise I cared most about keeping.
The room applauded.
Not for me.
For relief.
Later Maria called.
“Elijah.”
Her tone immediately concerned me.
“What happened?”
“Mateo found something.”
Her grandson had been helping her move boxes from an old storage room.
Inside one box were belongings from my father's final months.
A notebook.
Dad's notebook.
The final pages contained observations about Grant, Charles, and Rebecca.
But the last entry wasn't about fraud.
It was about me.
Eli trusts people longer than I do. I hope the world never punishes him for that kindness. But if it does, I hope he learns without becoming cruel.
I read that sentence repeatedly.
My father had known me.
Perhaps better than I knew myself.
There was another line.
Maria knows where the second key is.
I called her.
“What second key?”
She was silent.
Then she whispered:
May you like
“Oh.”
That is never a reassuring response.
