Chapter 10 - The File Grant Couldn’t Let Me Read
Grant hired an attorney.
Then he stopped speaking to me directly.
Every conversation went through legal counsel.
Every decision at the plant became a battle.
But legally, I still owned sixty percent.
And for the first time in seven years, I began using that power.
I suspended Celia pending investigation.
Grant tried to override me.
He couldn’t.
I froze nonessential vendor payments.
Meriton stopped receiving money.
I ordered an independent audit.
Grant called it reckless.
Employees called it overdue.
Then something surprising happened.
People began talking.
Once Celia was gone, accounting staff brought me documents.
A purchasing manager showed me strange contracts.
A forklift operator remembered seeing Grant load boxes at night.
A receptionist from years earlier remembered Celia frequently taking personal calls in Mom’s office.
One employee handed me a folder.
“I’ve kept this for six years.”
Inside were copies of invoices.
“Why?”
“Your mother told me once, ‘Never throw away a paper someone tells you doesn’t matter.’”
That sounded exactly like Mom.
The company had been full of witnesses.
They simply hadn’t realized they were witnesses.
The independent auditors found another pattern.
Grant had been slowly increasing company debt while siphoning cash away.
The plant looked profitable on paper.
But financial reserves were dangerously low.
The buyout offer suddenly made sense.
Grant wanted my shares before the fraud became impossible to hide.
Then he could sell the property.
Pay some debts.
Take the remaining money.
Disappear.
The land had recently been rezoned.
Its value was almost four times what employees knew.
Grant knew.
Celia knew.
I had discovered the rezoning application months earlier.
That was why the buyout offer was so low.
They weren’t buying a struggling business.
They were stealing valuable land.
Then Miguel found a file buried inside a deleted executive folder.
Filename:
EXITPLAN_FINAL
Inside was a spreadsheet.
Projected land sale.
Debt payoff.
Tax estimates.
Transfers.
Two personal distributions.
GH
CM
Grant Holloway.
Celia Morgan.
Total projected personal gain:
$11.8 million.
I stared at the screen.
“How long ago was this created?”
Miguel checked.
“Fourteen months.”
“And modified?”
“Three days before the hoist accident.”
There it was.
Three days before someone tried to kill me, Grant and Celia updated their exit plan.
A line in the spreadsheet read:
Minority issue resolved before closing.
Minority issue.
I owned sixty percent.
But perhaps Grant believed he would soon control my shares.
Or believed I wouldn’t be alive to object.
I printed the file and called Pierce.
Then Miguel frowned.
“There’s another linked document.”
“What?”
“Password protected.”
“Can you open it?”
“Give me time.”
He worked for two hours.
Finally:
“Got it.”
The file contained scanned legal forms.
Share transfer documents.
My name.
My forged signature.
Dated one day after the hoist accident.
I felt sick.
They had prepared paperwork to transfer my ownership after my death.
“How would that even work?”
Miguel shook his head.
“It probably wouldn’t survive serious legal review.”
“They thought nobody would challenge it.”
“Probably.”
There was also an unsigned death-related corporate resolution appointing Grant controlling officer.
Prepared in advance.
Before the accident.
That was no longer coincidence.
Pierce arrived with federal financial investigators.
By evening, warrants were being prepared.
But Grant disappeared.
His lawyer claimed he didn’t know where he was.
His phone went off.
His vehicle vanished.
Celia disappeared too.
For the first time, I wondered whether they might actually flee.
Then Atlas began behaving strangely.
He paced near the loading dock.
Sniffing.
Pulling toward the employee parking area.
I followed.
He stopped where Grant usually parked.
Then moved toward the road.
“Atlas.”
He pulled harder.
Thomas had told me Atlas could track familiar scent surprisingly well.
But after days?
I didn’t know.
Still, Pierce brought a K-9 handler.
Atlas wasn’t trained.
Nobody expected much.
Yet he led us across the lot.
Toward an unused access lane.
Then to a drainage area behind the property.
Buried beneath leaves was a black plastic bag.
Inside:
Grant’s company phone.
Broken.
And another item.
A set of keys.
One key had a plastic tag.
214.
The same number as Mom’s storage unit.
Grant had a key.
He had known about it.
Maybe he had even entered it.
But if he had, why hadn’t he taken the lockbox?
Pierce checked storage records.
Someone had attempted to access Unit 214 two days after Mom’s death.
The manager refused because the person’s name wasn’t on the lease.
Security notes recorded the name.
Grant Holloway.
Mom had outsmarted him.
For seven years, the evidence waited behind a door he could not legally open.
And now Grant was running.
But he wasn’t running randomly.
The broken phone contained a damaged memory card.
Technicians recovered one recent map search.
The old mill.
May you like
Grant was going back.
And this time, we had no idea what he planned to destroy.
