Chapter 5 - The Corporate Mortuary
Peter Sterling’s office was located on the thirty-fourth floor of an aluminum-and-glass tower on Wacker Drive, overlooking the bend of the Chicago River where the water turns from slate green to the color of wet lead.
It was nine o'clock on Saturday morning.
The rest of the floor was dark, the workstations silent under their dust covers, but the corner suite smelled of expensive roast coffee, ozone from the laser printers, and the cold, sharp sweat of three attorneys who had spent thirteen consecutive hours reading bank statements through magnifying glasses.
Peter Sterling sat behind an eight-foot desk of polished Macassar ebony. He was sixty-five, with silver hair that had been styled by a man who charged two hundred dollars a cut, wearing a bespoke double-breasted suit from a tailor on Savile Row.
He did not look like a man whose son was currently sitting on a plastic-covered bench in the Cermak intake ward.
He looked like an executioner who had discovered that his favorite broadaxe had a notch in the blade.
Across from him sat Harold Ross, the senior litigation partner from a firm that occupied four floors of the same building—a man whose teeth had been straightened fifty years ago and whose conscience had been removed shortly thereafter.
"You shouldn't have come here, Arthur," Peter said. His voice was a cultivated, mid-Atlantic baritone, the voice of a man who had spent four decades convincing church boards to invest their building funds in high-yield junk bonds. "We could have handled this through counsel. A simple civil agreement. Five hundred thousand dollars in a blind trust for the child’s education, an uncontested divorce decree in DuPage County, and an absolute non-disclosure agreement regarding the events of yesterday afternoon."
I sat in the leather client chair. I had not removed my shearling coat. The mud on my boots had dried into light grey flakes that fell onto his two-thousand-dollar silk Persian runner with every shift of my heels.
"You're thirty minutes behind the news, Peter," I said.
Harold Ross leaned forward, placing his gold Montblanc pen on a leather portfolio. "Mr. Vance, let us be reasonable. Your daughter has no independent income. Her previous employment as a middle-school art teacher ended two years ago. In a contested custody proceeding, the court will look at the financial stability of the respective households. Mark has a verified base compensation of four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, plus performance incentives. You have a public employee pension that barely covers the real estate taxes on your brick bungalow in Berwyn."
I took a sip from the cardboard cup of water I had brought from the lobby drinking fountain.
"Mark doesn't have an income, Harold," I said.
Peter Sterling’s eyebrows shifted half a millimeter. "What did you say?"
"I said your son is unemployed," I replied, pulling a five-page document from the inner pocket of my coat.
The paper was not legal bond; it was a printed copy of an electronic dispatch sent from the Chicago office of the Securities and Exchange Commission at six-thirty this morning.
"At eight o'clock yesterday evening," I continued, "an anonymous tip was submitted to the Whistleblower Office of the SEC under Section 21F of the Dodd-Frank Act. The submission contained the complete ledger of the private equity placements Mark executed for the Midwest Precision Stamping acquisition in 2023."
Peter went very still. His hands, which had been resting flat on the ebony desk, curled into two tight, bloodless knots.
"The placement included an undisclosed three-point-two-million-dollar 'consulting fee' paid to a shell entity registered in the British Virgin Islands under the name L-S-V Investments," I said. "L-S-V stands for Linda Sterling Vance. Your wife’s maiden name was Vance. No relation to my family, thank God."
Harold Ross didn't touch his Montblanc pen. He looked at the document, his eyes darting across the transaction hashes, and then he slowly leaned back in his high-backed leather chair, his jaw setting into that hard, defensive posture that lawyers adopt when they realize their client has committed an unpardonable structural error.
"That... that was an administrative oversight by the general partner," Ross muttered, but his voice lacked conviction; it had the hollow, rattling cadence of an empty drum.
"It’s wire fraud under 18 U.S. Code § 1343," I said. "And because the funds were transferred through an automated clearing house that utilizes the fiber-optic cables beneath the Chicago Board of Trade, it falls under the primary investigative jurisdiction of the Special Crimes Division—my old office."
I looked directly at Peter Sterling.
"Your son’s executive committee voted to terminate his employment with cause at seven-fifteen this morning, Peter. They didn't even wait for the market to open. They changed the electronic card-key codes on his office door, seized his corporate laptop, and sent two internal auditors down to the basement to impound his company car."
Peter did not shout. Men like Peter Sterling do not shout when their world catches fire; they calculate the salvage value of the charred timbers.
"What do you want, Arthur?" he asked. The mid-Atlantic polish was gone, replaced by the flat, nasal gravel of the South Side railyards where his grandfather had stolen coal from the Illinois Central hoppers.
"I want three things," I said, holding up three fingers.
"First: an absolute, irrevocable assignment of Mark’s fifty-percent equity interest in the Crestview Lane property to Emily, free and clear of all secondary mortgages and home-equity lines of credit."
"That house is worth two point two million," Ross choked out. "There’s an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar first lien from the Northern Trust—"
"You will satisfy that lien with the funds currently held in the Swiss account in Zurich, Peter," I said, ignoring the lawyer completely. "The one you used to hide the proceeds from the Cicero scrap sale in ninety-eight. I know the account number. It begins with the letters CH-88-0023."
Peter’s chest hitched. A tiny, blue vein beneath his left eye began to jump with an irregular, frantic rhythm.
"Second," I said. "A complete, sole-custody decree entered in the Circuit Court of Cook County—not DuPage—with an absolute waiver of all visitation rights until the child reaches the age of eighteen, unless supervised by an officer of the court at an approved mental health facility."
"Mark will never sign that," Peter whispered.
"Mark will sign anything if the alternative is spending the next five years in the federal penitentiary at Oxford, Wisconsin," I replied. "I spoke to the regional director of the SEC forty minutes ago. He’s an old friend from the organized crime strike force. He agreed to defer the criminal referral on the L-S-V Investments matter until Wednesday morning, provided the restitution agreement is executed before noon on Monday."
"And the third thing?" Peter asked, his head sinking three inches into his shoulders, his Savile Row jacket bunching awkwardly around his neck.
I stood up from the leather chair.
I picked up my cardboard water cup, crushed it in my right fist until the wax paper split with a sharp, dry pop, and dropped the wadded remains into his silver-plated wastebasket.
"The third thing, Peter," I said, "is that you will tell your wife Linda that if she ever sets foot in the same zip code as my daughter again, I will personally release the surveillance footage of her meeting with the zoning commissioner behind the Oak Brook mall in August of 2022."
Linda’s private life was an open secret among the process servers of the eighteenth judicial circuit, but Peter had spent three hundred thousand dollars in legal retainers to keep the depositions sealed in the chancery court archives.
Peter looked at the ebony desk. He looked at the window where the gray river turned toward the lake. He looked at the Montblanc pen that was no longer writing anything.
May you like
"The documents will be ready by four o'clock, Arthur," he whispered.
"No," I said, walking toward the mahogany double doors that led to the reception hall. "They will be ready by two. Because at two-fifteen, Emily has an appointment with an obstetrician who doesn't take checks from men who hit women."
