Chapter 4 - The Shadow Asset
Daniel's breath hitched. He reached for the envelope with a hand that was visibly shaking. Inside were bank statements, wire transfers, and property deeds provided to me by my investigator just hours earlier.
"You... you hired a detective?" he whispered, his confidence completely shattered.
"I didn't need a detective to find out you were cheating, Daniel. You left credit card statements on the printer," I said, leaning forward. "I hired a detective to find out why you were hiding money from your own daughter's college trust fund."
The receipts I had found in his pocket weren't just mundane paper scraps. The storage unit in Oak Park contained three safes. In those safes were hard drives containing proprietary code stolen from his former employer—code that he had secretly licensed to a third-party tech firm in Chicago. The eight hundred dollars a month wasn't for a love nest with Natalie; it was the rental fee for the vault housing his illicit wealth.
And Natalie wasn't just his mistress. She was the sister of the chief operating officer at that third-party firm.
"She doesn't love you, Daniel," I said, watching his eyes dart wildly across the financial papers. "You thought you were a suave, fifty-year-old executive pulling off a thrilling late-life romance. But Natalie was using you to extract the intellectual property you stolen from your firm. She picked a man who was arrogant enough to think he was uncatchable, and foolish enough to leave a paper trail in his coat pockets."
"Claire, please," he stammered, stepping toward me, his hands raised in supplication. "You don't understand... I did it for us! I was going to transfer the funds to our primary account after the legal window closed! I was trying to secure our retirement!"
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"Then why is Natalie listed as the sole beneficiary of Vance Holding LLC?" I asked softly.
The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush him. He stared at the signature line on the screenprinted corporate document. Natalie’s name was written in dark blue ink right next to his own.
