Chapter 4 - The Scapegoat's Ledger
The next morning, while the rain continued to pour over the Idaho timberlands, Lucas walked into the corporate headquarters of Lawson Lumber.
The building was quiet. Most of the executive staff had been given a mandatory two-week leave by Gregory before he flew to the Bahamas—a strategic move to keep the offices empty while Walter supposedly passed away at home.
Lucas unlocked his corner office.
He sat down at his desk and pulled out his official company laptop. For months, Derek had been swinging by his office with stacks of "routine equipment requisitions" and "lumber supply invoices," asking Lucas to sign them quickly before meetings.
Lucas opened the internal accounting software. With Attorney Vance standing behind him, Lucas ran a deep forensic trace on his own employee ID credentials.
Every single fraudulent transfer had occurred between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM—times when Lucas was either asleep at home or on-site at the mountain warehouses.
“Look at this,” Lucas pointed at the screen. “The remote access logs show my account was logged into from an IP address inside Rachel’s personal home office.”
“She was using your laptop while you were sleeping,” Vance noted, taking high-resolution photographs of the screen with a secure camera. “She had your passwords, your security tokens, and your biometric signatures.”
“She used to insist I leave my work bag on the hallway table,” Lucas remembered, a cold shudder running down his spine. “She told me she wanted me to 'leave work at the door' so we could focus on our marriage. She was taking my security keys while I was in the shower.”
“It’s a textbook setup,” Vance said. “Now, let’s flip the trap.”
Using Walter’s master override credentials—which had remained active in a dark server known only to the founder—Lucas began executing a series of silent system updates.
First, he altered the automated notification protocols. Instead of sending internal alerts to Derek’s email when a large transaction was flagged, the alerts were secretly re-routed directly to the State Attorney General’s Financial Crimes Division.
Second, Lucas uploaded the complete video footage from Walter’s hidden room cameras to an encrypted cloud server hosted by the State Police.
Finally, Lucas accessed the corporate credit line being used by Rachel and her family in the Bahamas.
At that very moment, three thousand miles away at the Royal Bahamian Resort, Rachel was sitting poolside, sipping a hundred-dollar cocktail while scrolling through a luxury yacht rental catalog.
Lucas clicked on the resort’s billing portal.
He didn't block the card completely. Instead, he lowered the daily transaction limit from fifty thousand dollars to exactly thirty-four dollars and fifty cents—the precise cost of a single gallon of water and a box of rehydration salts.
A minute later, Lucas’s personal phone vibrated on the desk.
It was a text message from Rachel.
Rachel: Lucas! What is wrong with the company card?! I just tried to pay for our private cabana and the payment was declined! Fix it immediately, you incompetent idiot!
Lucas stared at the screen for three long seconds. His fingers moved calmly across the glass.
Lucas: I’m working on the warehouse inventory files right now. Traffic is terrible. I’ll check with the bank when I get a chance.
Rachel: I don't care about the inventory! Fix it NOW! Derek is furious! We have a five-thousand-dollar dinner reservation tonight!
Lucas smiled—a cold, empty smile that held no emotion whatsoever.
Lucas: I'll do my best. Hope Grandfather is doing well.
May you like
He turned off his phone, tossed it into his drawer, and turned to Vance.
“She’s starting to panic,” Lucas said. “Now tell Derek to open the Cayman account.”
