Chapter 2 - The Severed Accounts
The police station was freezing. I sat in a plastic chair in Detective Miller’s office, holding a paper cup of bitter coffee against my swollen lip. Through the blinds, I could see Grant sitting in a holding cell. He wasn't pacing. He was sitting completely still, staring at the floor.
"He's being charged with aggravated assault and felony wire fraud," Miller said, sitting heavily at his desk. "Your attorney sent over the video feeds. We have it all. But there's a problem with the search warrant execution at the construction office."
I sat up straighter. "What problem?"
"By the time our guys breached the commercial suites, the servers were wiped. Bleached. Someone accessed them remotely about twenty minutes before we got there."
Now. The word Grant had shouted as he was arrested.
"Marcus," I said. "His brother. He's the registered agent for the shell companies."
I pulled my laptop from my tote bag and tethered it to my phone's hotspot. If Marcus had wiped the local servers, he was likely trying to move the stolen capital offshore before the SEC froze the business accounts. I bypassed the standard login portal and used the backdoor I’d coded into the firm's payroll software.
The main operating account was empty.
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But it hadn't been wired to the Cayman shells. The ledger showed a twelve-million-dollar outgoing transfer, routed directly into a domestic commercial real estate holding company. A company I recognized.
I stared at the screen, my stomach dropping. The money hadn't been stolen by Grant's brother. It had been transferred to a holding LLC registered to my own parents. Grant hadn't just drained the company; he had framed my family for the embezzlement.
