Chapter 6 - Skeletons in the Ledger
We marched into the glass atrium of Vance Logistics headquarters, the cavernous lobby echoing with the sound of our soaked boots against polished marble. Behind us, Victoria hurried in, her wet coat dripping onto the pristine floor, Robert trailing behind her while clutching his bruised wrist.
"This is an illegal intrusion!" Victoria yelled, her heels sliding slightly on the slick marble. "I will have the District Attorney destroy you, Sarah! You'll spend the rest of your miserable life in a state penitentiary!"
"Let’s see what the DA thinks about this first," Noah countered.
He walked directly to the reception console, connected his tablet to the master display, and within seconds, the massive eighty-foot digital wall that dominated the atrium flickered to life. Instead of the polished corporate promotional video that normally played on loop, the screen displayed a cascade of bank routing numbers, redacted shell company profiles, and forged signatures.
Robert gasped, his face draining of all color. "Where... where did you get those?"
"You kept your backup drives in Evelyn’s private storage unit in Queens," I said, turning to face him. "You thought because you paid the monthly rental fee under an alias, no one would ever look inside. But Evelyn had me listed as the emergency secondary contact thirteen years ago. When you stopped paying the rent last month to cover your gambling debts, the facility called me."
On the giant screen, a high-resolution scan of a document appeared: a forged death certificate for Mason and Noah Sterling, dated five years ago, claiming they had drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Maine.
"You declared them dead," I whispered, my voice trembling with an uncontrollable fury that had simmered for over a decade. "You filed these papers in the Bahamas so you could liquidate their mother's trust fund without waiting for them to reach eighteen."
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Victoria didn't look at the screen. She kept her eyes fixed on me, her expression turning glacial. "It was business, Sarah. What would two boys living in a tenement do with forty million dollars? They would have squandered it. I reinvested it."
"You bought a penthouse in Manhattan and a yacht in Monaco!" Noah yelled, his restraint finally breaking. "While she worked seventy hours a week nursing terminal patients! While she skipped meals so Mason and I could buy textbooks! You didn't reinvest anything—you stole from children while our mother's body was barely cold in the ground!"
