Chapter 11 - The Phantom SignatureThe ink on the emergency audit report was barely dry when the secure terminal on my desk flashed a violent crimson. I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours, my eyes burning from staring at columns of ghost figures, duplicate invoices, and shell corporations linked to Dominic Rossi. But the red alert wasn’t from Rossi’s faction. It was an internal security flag originating from the estate’s main vault deep beneath the west wing.
“Boss,” Daniel’s voice rasped through the intercom, sounding thin and strained. “You need to look at the master property ledger from nineteen-ninety-eight. We found a secondary file hidden under a physical lockbox in Evelyn’s private office.”
I didn't answer immediately. I picked up the encrypted drive Evelyn had dropped during the interrogation and slotted it into my secondary terminal. Files unlocked with a soft, digital chime, revealing a scanned document bearing a signature I hadn't seen since I was a boy: my father’s signature, countersigned by a man the city police department had declared dead in a warehouse fire twenty years ago—Arthur Vance, former chief financial officer of the Moretti shipping empire.
Arthur Vance. The father of federal prosecutor Sarah Vance.
The room seemed to tilt slightly on its axis. The embezzlement of the $8,400 wasn't just a rogue housekeeper padding her pockets or a rival mafia boss trying to buy local intelligence. It was a calculated breadcrumb trail leading straight back to the night my father supposedly died of a "heart attack" in his study.
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“Daniel,” I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous, razor-thin register. “Lock down the west wing vault. Do not let anyone touch that physical lockbox until I get down there.”
“Too late, boss,” Daniel replied, the sound of a shattering glass door echoing through his comm-line. “Someone’s already inside.”
