Chapter 3 - The Dead Woman's PhoneThe sterile smell of the police precinct morgue was enough to turn a stomach of iron, but I stood unfazed beside the stainless-steel table. Detective Miller, a tired homicide veteran with cynical eyes, pulled back the white sheet to reveal the cold, bruised face of an aging woman with dyed blonde hair.
"Karen Vance," Detective Miller grunted, clicking his ballpoint pen. "Found wrapped in industrial plastic inside a rented U-Haul storage unit. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the cranial base. Estimated time of death: eight days ago."
I stared at the corpse. I had never met Karen Vance in my life, yet her existence was now inextricably linked to the ghost of my wife.
"What about the cell phone?" I asked, keeping my voice clipped and authoritative.
Miller reached into an evidence bag and handed over a smashed, blood-spattered smartphone inside an airtight plastic pouch. "Recovered from her coat pocket. The screen is destroyed, but our cyber unit managed to extract the call logs and messaging database before the flash memory degraded completely."
"And?"
"The last outgoing call made from this phone yesterday evening wasn't to emergency services. It wasn't to a relative," Miller said, eyeing me strangely. "It was routed to a burner cell tower registered directly to an encrypted corporate shell company owned by Blackwell Enterprises."
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
A shell company under my corporate umbrella?
"Impossible," I countered instantly. "My conglomerate has hundreds of subsidiaries. Anyone with clearance could—"
"The clearance level required for that specific routing code," Miller interrupted smoothly, "is Tier One. Executive override. Only two people in the entire world possess that biometric key: you, Mr. Blackwell... and your deceased wife, who held legacy administrative rights she never formally revoked before her plane went down."
I felt a cold sweat break out across my neck. Someone within my own inner circle—or someone using Grace's ghost as a weapon—was framing me from the inside out.
"Give me the data dump," I demanded, holding out my hand.
Miller hesitated, then slid the encrypted thumb drive across the steel table. "Be careful, Marcus. The corporate sharks in this city smell blood in the water. If the media catches wind that a dead woman's guardian was murdered using your corporate infrastructure, your board will trigger an emergency ouster by sunrise."
I pocketed the drive, turned on my heel, and walked out into the biting Chicago wind.
When I climbed back into the back of my limousine, David was waiting with a grim expression.
"Sir, we have a major crisis at the downtown headquarters. The board of directors has called an emergency quorum for midnight. They've received an anonymous whistleblower package containing photos of you at Lincoln Park with Emma... accompanied by a DNA comparison chart."
I froze. "What kind of chart?"
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"Showing a 99.9% paternal match between you and an unregistered minor," David swallowed hard. "The board is calling it a massive corporate liability, a scandal of epic proportions. They're voting to freeze your voting shares and strip you of your CEO title."
They weren't just trying to oust me. They were cutting off my head while I was distracted by a ghost.
