Chapter 13 - The Auditor’s Ledger
The victory at the Hibernian Gala was intoxicating, but Thomas and I both knew that wounded beasts were the most lethal.
By two o'clock the following morning, the library at Tradd Street looked like a tactical war room. Manila folders, maritime charts, and stacks of financial audits were spread across the mahogany dining table. The ceiling fan spun slowly overhead, stirring the scent of black coffee and old paper.
Barnaby sat loyally beneath the table, his heavy head resting on my bare foot. Up on the second floor, Lily was sound asleep, watched over by Mrs. Gable, our trusted housekeeper whose family had served the Lowcountry for three generations.
"It doesn't make sense, Thomas," I said, tracing a red pen down the asset transfer records Samuel Ward had slipped us. "DeWitt is ruthless, but he's not an idiot. He wouldn't have handed Carter Montgomery eighty million dollars in liquidity just on Julian's word. There had to be an insider. Someone inside Vance Logistics verified our dredging boundaries before DeWitt wired the money."
Thomas was leaning against the mantelpiece, staring into the cold fireplace, his expression grim. He took a slow swallow from a glass of neat bourbon.
"I know," he said quietly.
I looked up, startled by the stillness in his voice. "You know who it is?"
"There are only four people with access to the sub-tier geotechnical surveys of the south terminal," Thomas said, turning to face me. "Me, you, the Chief of Engineering, and Frank Miller."
"Frank?" My heart sank. Frank Miller had been Thomas’s right-hand man for nearly fifteen years. He had helped Thomas build Vance Logistics from two beat-up tugboats into a regional shipping juggernaut. Frank had danced at our quiet courthouse wedding; he had bought Lily a wooden sailboat for her seventh birthday. "Thomas, no. Frank wouldn't betray you. He's family."
"Frank has a son in college at Duke who accumulated three hundred thousand dollars in illicit gambling debts through a sports-betting ring in Charlotte," Thomas said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion—a sure sign that he was hurting deeply. "I had my security team pull the phone records an hour ago. Frank received four calls from Carter Montgomery’s burner number over the past ten days. And yesterday morning, his son’s debt was marked paid in full by an offshore LLC in Curacao."
The room went cold. The cruelty of Julian’s web was boundless. Even from a jail cell, Julian knew how to find the single hairline fracture in a fortress and drive a wedge into it until everything cracked.
"What do we do?" I asked, rising from my chair and coming to stand before Thomas. I reached up, my fingers resting against his rough cheek. "If Frank testifies that our environmental permits were backdated, the federal inspectors will shut down the entire port opening next week. It will bankrupt the Vance foundation before we can even load the first freight train."
Thomas closed his eyes for a second, leaning into my touch. When he opened them, the sorrow was gone, replaced by a terrifying, cold resolve.
"Frank isn't evil, Eleanor. He's weak. And weak men can be broken—or they can be redeemed. But we don't wait for him to drop the axe."
Before Thomas could finish his thought, the landline phone on the desk shrieked in the silence of the night.
We both froze. No one called the private landline at 2:45 A.M. unless the world was burning.
Thomas snatched the receiver. "Vance."
I watched his eyes widen, the knuckles of his hand turning bone-white against the receiver.
"When?" Thomas barked. "How many? Is the perimeter compromised?"
He listened for three agonizing seconds, then slammed the receiver down onto the cradle.
May you like
"Eleanor, get your shoes on," Thomas said, already grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. "The south berth security cameras just went dark. A commercial tugboat just rammed the dredging barge at Berth Four, and Frank Miller was seen leaving the administration building with the primary backup hard drives."
***
