Chapter 3 - A MISSING EMPLOYEE AND THE THREE-MILLION-DOLLAR SECRET
Nicholas locked the mansion down at 9:18 p.m.
Nobody entered.
Nobody left.
He did not call the men who usually handled problems for him.
For once, he called people who operated outside his world.
His attorney, Simon Greer.
A private forensic accountant Simon trusted.
And, after Audrey agreed, local investigators.
He did not tell Audrey what she had to do.
He asked.
That distinction mattered.
At first, she seemed almost suspicious of it.
“You’re asking my permission?”
“It’s your brother.”
“You could just do whatever you wanted.”
“I could.”
Nicholas held her gaze.
“That doesn’t mean I should.”
For several seconds, she said nothing.
Then she nodded.
“Get Eli somewhere safe.”
Nicholas made the call.
While Simon arranged for Audrey’s aunt and brother to meet officers at a public location, Nicholas moved Audrey into the small library beside the kitchen rather than his private office.
The library had two doors.
Both visible.
Audrey noticed.
“You chose this room because there’s another exit.”
“Yes.”
“So I wouldn’t feel trapped.”
“Yes.”
She looked away.
Nicholas poured coffee for himself and tea for her.
His hands were steady.
His mind was not.
“Tell me about the woman who disappeared.”
“Her name is Jenna Cole.”
He remembered her.
Late forties.
Laundry department.
Two children.
Always wore bright red reading glasses.
“She resigned last month.”
“No.”
Audrey wrapped both hands around her tea.
“Graham said she resigned.”
“What happened?”
“She found fake purchases.”
“What purchases?”
“Cameras. Access systems. Security software. Things the house supposedly bought but never received.”
Nicholas frowned.
“Amounts?”
“Thousands at first.”
“Then?”
“She found invoices totaling almost nine hundred thousand dollars.”
Nicholas went silent.
Audrey continued.
“Jenna told Graham because she thought he’d want to know.”
“That was the last person she should have told.”
“She learned that too late.”
“What happened?”
“He accused her of stealing jewelry from one of the upstairs rooms.”
Nicholas remembered.
A diamond bracelet had vanished six weeks earlier.
Graham had personally handled the investigation.
The bracelet had supposedly been found inside Jenna’s locker.
Nicholas had been in Montreal on business.
He had approved her termination over the phone.
His stomach tightened.
“I fired her.”
Audrey looked at him.
“You trusted the evidence you were given.”
“I fired her.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have.”
She studied him.
“That’s not how trust works.”
Nicholas’s eyes lifted.
Audrey looked down at her tea.
“You trust people until they give you a reason not to. Otherwise you end up alone.”
“Are you defending me?”
“No.”
A faint, humorless smile crossed her face.
“I’m telling you guilt won’t help Jenna.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
“What did you hear three nights ago?”
Audrey’s fingers tightened around the cup.
“I was cleaning your upstairs study.”
Nicholas waited.
“Graham came in talking on the phone. He didn’t know I was behind the curtains.”
“What did he say?”
“That everything would be ready before Saturday night.”
“What would?”
“I don’t know. He said the account access had been copied. He said the signature would hold long enough. Then he said something about you being too busy at the foundation dinner to notice until Monday.”
Saturday night.
Nicholas’s annual charity dinner.
More than four hundred guests.
Most of his senior managers would attend.
“So he saw you?”
Audrey touched the bruise beneath her eye.
“He heard me move.”
Nicholas’s jaw tightened.
“He grabbed you?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
She looked toward the door.
“No.”
“Audrey.”
“You said I decide what I tell you.”
He stopped.
She was right.
Nicholas sat back.
“You do.”
The silence lasted nearly a minute.
Then Audrey continued on her own.
“He asked what I heard. I said nothing.”
Her voice became flatter.
“He didn’t believe me.”
Nicholas noticed the change.
The way people sometimes separated themselves from memories they could not afford to feel yet.
“He pulled me into the service corridor. There aren’t cameras there.”
“Because Graham removed them from that section six months ago.”
Audrey nodded.
“He shoved me into the wall.”
Nicholas’s fingers curled.
“He hit you.”
She said nothing.
That was answer enough.
“He told me nobody would believe a housekeeper over the man who had protected you for twelve years.”
Nicholas looked away.
“He said you’d assume I was stealing.”
Audrey’s voice cracked.
“He told me he could make it true.”
Nicholas turned back.
“What does that mean?”
“I didn’t know then.”
His phone rang.
Simon.
Nicholas put it on speaker only after Audrey nodded.
“I found something,” Simon said. “Several payments routed through household security vendors. Total is just under three million over eleven months.”
Nicholas stood.
“To whom?”
“Shell companies.”
“Owned by?”
“That gets complicated.”
“It usually does.”
“One company traces to a former partner of your father’s.”
Nicholas stopped breathing for a moment.
“Name.”
“Everett Shaw.”
Audrey watched his face change.
Nicholas had not heard that name spoken aloud in years.
Everett Shaw had once been his father’s closest business partner.
Then he had become the man blamed for the ambush that killed Thomas Rainer fourteen years earlier.
Shaw disappeared shortly afterward.
Nicholas had grown up believing he had fled the country.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure enough to tell you before I’m finished.”
Nicholas looked toward the rain-dark windows.
“My father believed Shaw betrayed him.”
“So did everyone else.”
May you like
Nicholas’s voice lowered.
“Find out if everyone was wrong.”
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