Chapter 6 - THE MAN WHO HAD GUARDED THEM FOR TWENTY YEARS
Paul Mercer did not make it out of my mansion.
Not because Vincent shot him.
He wanted to.
I saw it.
Instead, Richard called federal investigators who had already been quietly briefed about the audit.
That shocked Vincent almost as much as the betrayal.
“You contacted federal authorities?”
Richard looked tired.
“I should have done it twenty years ago.”
Mercer was detained.
His phone was seized.
The message to Marco had already delivered.
Marco disappeared before noon.
His office was empty.
His company car was found near O'Hare.
No flight under his name.
No easy answer.
Vincent paced my study.
I watched him.
“You're going to wear a trench into my floor.”
He stopped.
“Sorry.”
That was new too.
Richard sat with my father's papers.
“Gabriel was always different.”
Vincent looked at him.
“You mean criminal.”
“I mean he believed the legal companies were useful only because they hid the illegal ones.”
“And you let him stay.”
Richard accepted the blow.
“Yes.”
Twenty years earlier, Thomas Bennett discovered Gabriel using Moretti freight routes to move contraband and siphon legitimate revenue.
Richard confronted his brother.
Gabriel denied everything.
Then Gabriel died in a late-night crash before the family could settle it.
“Who investigated?” Nathan asked.
Richard looked toward the hallway where Mercer had been taken away.
“Paul.”
Of course.
The report blamed mechanical failure.
Thomas never believed it.
He spent years documenting irregular accounts connected to Gabriel's former network.
Then the activity stopped.
Or seemed to.
“Marco restarted it,” I said.
Richard shook his head.
“Maybe he never stopped.”
Vincent sat down.
For the first time since I'd known him, the man who ran Moretti Holdings looked uncertain inside his own family history.
Nathan opened another file from my father's box.
“There's more.”
A ledger.
Old payments.
One name appeared repeatedly.
Carter Management Services.
Sophia's last name.
I looked toward her.
She went pale.
“What?”
Nathan turned the page.
“Who was your father?”
Sophia didn't answer.
Vincent looked at her.
“Sophia.”
“Daniel Carter.”
Richard stood.
The name meant something to him.
“Gabriel's accountant.”
Sophia's eyes filled.
“Yes.”
I stared.
“You knew?”
“Not when Vincent hired me.”
“Then when?”
“Three years ago.”
Her father had died when she was seventeen.
Her mother told her he'd been an accountant for a freight business.
Nothing more.
After joining Moretti Holdings, Sophia discovered old payroll records.
Then she found her father's name in archived fraud files.
She started asking questions.
That was how the current investigation began.
“You didn't tell Vincent until when?” I asked.
“Six months ago.”
The exact period when the overnight meetings started.
Richard looked at her.
“Your father disappeared before Gabriel died.”
Sophia nodded.
“He didn't disappear.”
She reached into her bag.
“He left this with my mother.”
A letter.
Daniel Carter had written that Gabriel discovered Thomas Bennett was investigating the freight accounts.
He warned Thomas.
Then someone came for him.
Daniel fled Chicago under another name.
He lived for another eleven years.
Sophia had known none of it until her mother died last year and left the letter.
Vincent read the final paragraph.
His face changed.
“What?”
He handed it to Richard.
Daniel had named the person who ordered Gabriel's fatal car sabotage.
Not Thomas.
Not a rival.
Marco.
I stared.
“He was what, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-one,” Richard said.
Sophia whispered, “He killed his own father.”
Why?
Daniel's letter gave the answer.
Gabriel had decided to confess.
He wanted a deal.
Marco believed confession would destroy everything he expected to inherit.
So he stopped him.
A twenty-one-year-old son had killed his father to preserve an empire.
And for two decades, Richard had unknowingly kept that son inside the family company.
Then Nathan's phone buzzed.
He read the message.
“Claire.”
“What?”
He looked at me strangely.
“Marco didn't go to the airport.”
“Where did he go?”
Nathan turned the phone.
A toll camera had captured Marco's car heading north.
Toward the riverside mansion.
My mansion.
May you like
He hadn't fled Chicago.
He had come back for something in my father's house that we still hadn't found.
