Chapter 9 - The Investor Meeting Julian Was Afraid Of
Northstar’s audit was supposed to begin the Monday after the retreat.
Instead, it began two weeks later under court-supervised preservation orders.
The lead forensic accountant, Rebecca Shaw, reconstructed the final seventy-two hours before the marina incident.
Thursday morning: Julian learned Northstar’s beneficial owner was Genevieve Sterling Vance.
Thursday afternoon: he accessed the Blue Arc accounting files from his office and deleted several folders.
Thursday night: he met Victoria at a waterfront hotel.
Friday morning: he instructed the media contractor to film my reluctance around the water.
Friday afternoon: he gave me the sedative.
Friday evening: he was arrested.
Clean.
But Rebecca found one more piece.
An email Julian sent himself from a personal account at 2:08 a.m. Thursday.
Subject:
IF NORTHSTAR MOVES
Inside were bullet points.
Delay review.
Challenge authority.
Claim marital conflict.
Emergency board vote.
Accident contingency.
The phrase was almost unbelievable.
Accident contingency.
Underneath it:
G death + child = estate/control path cleaner. V exposed as operator if needed.
G.
Me.
V.
Victoria.
Child.
Eleanor.
There it was in Julian’s own shorthand.
Still, something bothered Rebecca.
“The inheritance logic isn’t right,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your family trust doesn’t pass to Julian.”
“I know.”
“And Northstar’s shares aren’t personally transferable through ordinary spousal succession.”
“I know.”
“So why did he think your death created a cleaner control path?”
That question mattered.
Victoria thought he wanted inheritance.
The message suggested he thought so too.
But the actual estate documents said otherwise.
Either Julian misunderstood my finances completely—
or the money he wanted was somewhere else.
Rebecca pulled one final file from Vance Meridian’s corporate archives.
A buy-sell agreement.
Ten years old.
Signed when Northstar first invested.
It contained a provision I had almost forgotten.
If the anonymous principal behind Northstar died while married to a Vance Meridian founder, the company had a thirty-day option to repurchase certain preferred shares at a formula price fixed years earlier.
At today’s valuation, that price was grotesquely low.
If I died, Julian could potentially force Northstar out of the company cheaply.
Not inherit my wealth.
Erase my investor control.
That was the first half of the true twist.
May you like
The second half arrived the next morning.
And it showed that even Victoria had misunderstood why Julian was willing to kill.
