Chapter 11 - The Missing Funds
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While waiting for the judge to review the emergency protective order, I asked Rachel for a secure terminal in her office to dive deeper into the financial records I had downloaded that morning. If Owen was arrogant enough to bring his mistress into my grandmother's house, he was arrogant enough to leave a sloppy financial trail.
I spent three hours meticulously cross-referencing our joint banking statements with the credit card logs.
The first thing I found was infuriating, but predictable. Owen had used our joint rewards credit card to purchase over twelve thousand dollars in high-end diamond jewelry over the past six months. The shipping addresses perfectly matched Dana Vale’s luxury downtown apartment.
But the jewelry was just the surface noise. As a forensic accountant, I was looking for the deep, systemic rot.
I found it buried in the wire transfer logs.
Exactly four months ago, Owen had quietly transferred $38,000 from our joint high-yield savings account into a obscure, secondary checking account I had absolutely no prior knowledge of.
I dug further, tracing the routing numbers connected to that hidden account. It was linked to a small, private LLC registered in Delaware.
When Naomi Price from Halcyon Compliance called me later that afternoon to update me on the corporate investigation, she asked me a very specific, pointed question.
"Mrs. Mercer, during your review of your household finances, did you happen to recognize three large, recurring monthly payments labeled simply as 'Consulting Services'?" Naomi asked, her voice tight.
I looked at the highlighted spreadsheet on my screen. "I did. The payments were routed through an obscure Delaware LLC."
"That LLC is a shell company entirely registered to Dana Vale," Naomi confirmed grimly. "We found the matching outgoing invoices in Owen’s corporate files."
I stared at the numbers, the final, devastating puzzle pieces locking perfectly into place.
Dana’s small, private side company had systematically received a staggering $186,000 over the course of eighteen months. I cross-referenced the exact dates of the wire transfers with the public procurement timeline Naomi had securely shared with me.
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Every single $186,000 payment was deposited exactly three days after Owen had officially, internally adjusted the competitor vendor scores in favor of Dana’s employer.
It wasn't just an affair. It was a massive, highly documented kickback scheme.
