Chapter 14 - What Victor Was Hiding.
Victor returned to Bellamy House that afternoon under the watch of investigators.
He looked smaller without his black manager’s jacket.
Elena arrived after Noah’s fever dropped, but she refused to sit near him.
Victor did not ask her to.
“I told myself I was only moving numbers.”
Elena stared at him.
“You put your hands on me.”
“I know.”
“You watched me beg for money I earned.”
“I know.”
“You knew I had a baby.”
Victor’s eyes dropped to the bottle on the table.
“I know.”
Elena’s voice became quiet.
“Then don’t ask me to feel sorry for you.”
“I’m not.”
That was the first answer she believed from him.
Victor explained how the scheme began.
Daniel discovered that the Grace fund carried large reserves and weak oversight after Grace’s death.
Small fraudulent grants could be hidden among legitimate emergency payments.
Victor supplied employee identities from hiring files.
Daniel controlled the financial approvals.
Rook received most of the stolen money.
Victor received enough to keep participating.
When Victor became afraid, he started recording conversations and copying records.
He never planned to expose Daniel.
He planned to survive him.
Adrian’s disgust was obvious.
“So why keep Grace’s memorandum?”
“Because it proved Daniel knew every signature was unauthorized.”
“Why not give it to me?”
Victor gave a broken laugh.
“Because then I would have had to explain how I got it.”
Elena shook her head.
“Everyone in this story was more afraid of getting caught than they were ashamed of what they were doing.”
No one answered her.
An investigator entered with news.
Daniel had used a company driver to reach a private airfield outside the city.
He had not boarded a plane.
The driver said Daniel changed his mind after receiving a phone call.
Adrian asked where he went next.
The investigator looked at him.
“Your sister’s old foundation office.”
Adrian stood so quickly his chair struck the wall.
The office had been closed for years but still contained archived personal files belonging to Grace.
Daniel knew the building.
He had once served as the foundation’s treasurer.
Police reached it first.
They found a rear window broken and several file cabinets open.
Daniel was not there.
But the Rook laptop was sitting on Grace’s old desk.
Its screen was still awake.
A transfer window was open.
The remaining eight hundred twenty-six thousand dollars had not moved.
Instead, someone had uploaded a folder to a secure account minutes before police arrived.
The folder was titled MERCER PROOF.
Adrian opened the copied directory with investigators present.
Inside was a scanned letter from Grace addressed to him.
He had never seen it before.
The first line read, Adrian, if Daniel is still with the company when you read this, I was wrong to trust him.
At the foundation office, investigators also found evidence that Daniel had not gone there to surrender.
He had been searching Grace’s archived files for the original letter and the last surviving trustee correspondence.
He had uploaded the material because he planned to argue that Adrian had known about the weakness in the fund for years.
Instead, the documents showed the opposite.
They showed that Grace had tried to close the weakness and that Daniel had helped prevent her instructions from being enforced.
When Victor heard that, he covered his face with both hands.
“All this time, he told me the memo was meaningless.”
Adrian looked at him without sympathy.
“You wanted it to be meaningless.”
May you like
Victor nodded.
“Yes.”
