Chapter 9 - The Forty-Eighth Name
We audited all access logs.
Forty-seven Collins relatives.
One by one.
Nothing.
The Evergreen financial ceiling had not been downloaded.
It had been photographed.
Security cameras showed someone entering my office during the company Christmas party.
A woman.
Face hidden by angle.
Claire?
Same height.
Similar blonde hair.
My stomach dropped.
Claire watched beside me.
“That isn't me.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Yes.”
She pulled out photographs.
At the timestamp, she was standing beside Sophie at the party downstairs.
Sophie confirmed it.
So who?
The woman wore an employee badge.
Rebecca enhanced the image enough to identify department color.
Executive administration.
Only four people.
Then Sophie noticed the shoes.
“I know those.”
We looked at her.
“Grandma wears them.”
Linda.
My mother-in-law.
She wasn't an employee.
But she had borrowed Claire’s old executive-family access badge.
Linda broke within an hour.
Martin told her to photograph the file.
But not for a competitor.
For “insurance.”
She sent the photographs to him six weeks earlier.
So Martin already knew Evergreen.
His later server download was theater.
Why?
To make investigators focus on obvious theft while hiding the earlier leak.
But Martin claimed he never gave information to Hartwell’s competitor.
Maybe another lie.
Then Rebecca traced Linda’s emailed photographs.
She sent them to Martin.
Martin forwarded them to an encrypted address.
That account belonged to Gregory Sloan.
Our divorce lawyer.
Sloan then communicated with someone at the competing bidder.
Now the conspiracy had structure.
But when federal investigators subpoenaed payment records, Sloan had not been paid by the competitor.
He had been paid by someone else.
$900,000.
Through three shell companies.
Final beneficial owner?
Hartwell Infrastructure itself.
The company we were trying to acquire.
I stared at Rebecca.
“Hartwell paid Sloan to sabotage its own sale?”
“Yes.”
Why would a distressed company sabotage a $41 million acquisition?
Unless it wasn't distressed.
Unless someone wanted Whitaker to believe it was.
Then our CFO entered.
His face looked terrible.
“Daniel.”
“What?”
“There’s something about Hartwell you don't know.”
He closed the door.
“My brother owns part of it.”
Silence.
There it was.
The forty-eighth name.
Not Collins.
Not family.
My own CFO, Michael Grant.
The man beside me for eleven years.
May you like
And suddenly I realized Martin might not be the architect.
He might only be another participant.
