Chapter 27 - The ghost from the unknown account
Marcus Vance's office was on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise overlooking the central square. When Sarah walked in at ten o'clock in the morning, Marcus was standing at his conference table, surrounded by stacks of thick audit files marked with colorful sticky notes.
"Good morning, Sarah. You look like you slept very well in your new home," Marcus smiled, gently pushing his silver-rimmed glasses up his nose.
"I've slept better than any night in the last twenty years, Marcus," Sarah replied, sitting down in the leather chair opposite and opening her personal notebook. "Tell me what's going on with that account."
Marcus sat down, clasped his hands together, his voice low and serious. "When we exposed the accounts that nobody knew about in the previous hearing, Daniel and her uncle thought that simply returning her original trust funds would close the civil case. That's why they made the secret settlement offer last week. But when she refused to sign the confidentiality agreement—that is, refused the price of silence—the court forwarded all of those bank statements to the financial crime investigation agency."
He opened a red file folder and turned it towards Sarah.
"This morning, an emergency lockdown order was implemented. It turns out that secret account wasn't just used to siphon off her maternal grandfather's inheritance, but also served as a place for Daniel and Uncle Robert to launder money and evade taxes for their family's chain of building materials stores. All of their mortgaged assets—including the main house on Lilac Street—all of them are subject to seizure."
Sarah watched the numbers dance across the white page. The people who had once berated her as useless just for spilling a glass of lemonade, those who once surrounded her like a chorus of judgment—it turned out that he built his wealth on forged signatures and stolen money.
"What was their reaction?" Sarah asked, her voice as calm as a still lake.
"Utter panic," Marcus replied bluntly. "Daniel's lawyer has called me six times since seven o'clock this morning. They accuse you of deliberately destroying the family. But the most interesting thing isn't Daniel." Marcus took out a small white envelope and placed it on the table. "An hour ago, someone brought this to the reception desk of my office and asked me to deliver it to you personally."
Sarah frowned, picking up the envelope. The hastily written handwriting on the outside was very familiar—it was Chloe's, her cousin who was always filming everything with her phone.
May you like
Inside the envelope was just a small piece of paper: "I know what the edited video couldn't fully show. I still keep the original 18-minute video on my separate hard drive, along with what was hidden behind the photo in my grandfather's drawer. Meet me at the cafe on the corner of Elm Street at 3 p.m. today. Come alone. I don't want to sink to the bottom with them."
When the ship begins to sink, the first person to jump off the deck is always the one who had been most enthusiastically watching the spectacle.
