Chapter 6 - The Confession TapeBefore we could lift Daniel from the wheelchair, a small cassette recorder resting near the desk began to blink with a faint red LED light.
I frowned, walking over to it. There was a handwritten note taped to the top in Gertrude’s shaky, elegant handwriting: Play this only when you are all together.
With trembling fingers, I pressed the Play button.
Gertrude’s voice filled the sterile room, sounding raspy and tired, recorded perhaps a week before her death:
“If you are hearing this, Rosalyn, my sins have finally caught up with me. I was a coward. I watched my son become a monster because I refused to admit that I had spoiled him past the point of redemption. Christopher didn't just steal Daniel’s company and try to kill him. He also left a paper trail of blood that reaches far beyond that boat.”
The tape hissed, a static sound scratching through the tiny speaker.
“Look inside the false bottom of the nightstand,” Gertrude’s recorded voice instructed. “There is a ledger Christopher kept—not of money, but of his financial backers. Men from the syndicate who financed his early real estate acquisitions using laundered drug money. If Christopher goes down, he plans to drag your children into it. He set up dummy LLCs in Nicole and Liam’s names when they turned eighteen, signing documents using forged notary seals.”
I gasped, dropping my hand from the recorder. Nicole and Liam? Christopher had framed our children as well?
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"That bastard," Vanessa hissed, slamming her fist against the wall. "He wasn't just planning to dump the debt on you, Aunt Rosalyn. He was setting up a multi-generational fall guy network so the feds would never trace the syndicate money back to him."
"We need to get this to Elaine immediately," I said, grabbing the ledger from the nightstand. "If the federal investigators think Christopher is just a white-collar embezzler, they'll offer him a plea deal. We need to prove this is organized crime."
