Chapter 3 - The Accountant’s Investigation
For the first hour,
I just sat there,
watching the shadows move across the kitchen floor.
I thought about the night Daniel was born,
the way Robert had cried with joy.
I thought about his first steps,
his graduation,
and the pride I felt when he got his first job.
But then,
the accountant in me took over.
Emotions are messy,
but numbers are clean.
Numbers don't lie,
and numbers always leave a trail.
I walked over to my desk in the corner of the living room and opened my laptop.
Marissa had been too angry to realize she had left one thing behind.
A small,
carbon-copy receipt for a wire transfer that had slipped out of the folder.
I picked it up from the floor,
my eyes scanning the details.
The recipient wasn't a bank or a real estate firm.
It was an LLC called "Ascent Horizons."
I typed the name into a corporate registry database I still had access to.
The company had been formed only six months ago.
The registered agent was a man named Victor Vance.
I searched for the address.
It was a P.O. Box in a strip mall three towns over.
My pulse began to quicken as the red flags started to pile up.
A half-million dollar debt to a six-month-old LLC with a P.O. Box?
That wasn't a real estate investment.
That was a scam,
or it was something much darker.
I looked up Victor Vance.
He didn't have a LinkedIn profile or a professional website.
What he did have was a criminal record for illegal gambling and predatory lending.
My son hadn't just made a bad investment.
He had gotten involved with sharks.
But why would Marissa be so defensive?
Why would she hide the name of the 'investor'?
I dug deeper into Marissa’s own digital footprint,
searching through her social media and public records.
I found a photo from a wedding three years ago.
In the background,
blurred but recognizable,
was a man standing next to Marissa.
The caption tagged him as 'Victor.'
My heart stopped.
Marissa knew him.
She knew exactly who they were giving the money to.
She wasn't a victim of a bad investment.
She was the architect of the disaster.
I realized then that my son was being led to the slaughter by the woman he loved.
I spent the rest of the night printing out documents and connecting the dots.
By three in the morning,
May you like
I had a file of my own.
It was time to wait for the fallout.
