Chapter 6 - The Paper Guillotine
In Denver, the basement conference room of Arthur Sterling’s office was completely silent save for the whir of a heavy-duty laser printer.
Arthur sat at the head of the long walnut table, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, methodically sorting through a three-inch-thick stack of certified bank records, title abstracts, and wire transfer logs.
Chloe sat three chairs away from him, her head in her hands, her shoulders slumped in total defeat. She had cried until her eyelids were swollen and purple, her emerald coat thrown carelessly over the back of an empty chair like a discarded costume. Her phone lay face-up on the table, its screen dark.
I stood by the window, looking out into the narrow alleyway behind the Cherry Creek building. The sky was turning a dark, bruised violet as another mountain storm rolled in from the foothills.
The door opened, and Agent Miller of the FBI walked in. He was forty-five, with short-cropped graying hair, wearing a dark blue suit with a small gold pin on the lapel. He carried a ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook laptop and an empty leather document envelope.
"The wire just posted," Miller said without preamble.
Chloe flinched, pulling her hands away from her face, looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.
"To the title escrow?" Arthur asked.
"To the court-monitored interpleader account at Wells Fargo," Miller corrected, a thin, satisfaction-free smile touching his lips. "Mr. Vance just transferred two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of illicit funds directly into an account administered by the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. He did it from an IP address in Palm Springs, using an unencrypted residential network."
Miller set his laptop on the table and turned it toward me.
"That transfer satisfies the final evidentiary requirement for the federal indictment, Mrs. Vance," he said. "By moving funds derived from the fraudulent Douglas County escrow account across state lines to facilitate an illicit real estate conveyance, your husband has committed aggravated wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering under Section 1956."
"And the sister?" Arthur asked, gesturing with his fountain pen toward the photograph of Julianne Mercer.
"The warrant for Julianne Mercer was signed twenty minutes ago by a magistrate in Riverside," Miller said. "She has three outstanding bench warrants from Maricopa County, Arizona, dating back to twenty-twenty-one. We have two units from the Palm Springs field office staging at the bottom of North Palm Canyon Drive right now."
I looked down at the screen. On the display was an aerial map of the Ascend Condominiums, with two small blue icons blinking slowly near the security gate.
"What about the Zurich story?" I asked. "Did he ever actually have a job there?"
Miller let out a short, dry chuckle that held no humor. "We contacted the Zurich municipal police through our legal attaché in Bern this morning. There is no corporate office for Vance Logistics in Switzerland. There never was. What he did have was an active lease on a private safe deposit box at a private bank on the Bahnhofstrasse. He had scheduled an international wire for nine o'clock tomorrow morning from his Denver accounts, intending to convert the proceeds of your grandfather's trust into bearer bonds held in that vault."
"He was going to run," I whispered.
"He was never going to live in Palm Springs," Miller said. "Palm Springs was the staging area to dump the real estate liability onto Melanie Harper and your sister. He was booked on a private charter from Van Nuys to Lisbon departing on Friday morning. With Julianne."
Chloe let out a sharp, choked gasp, her hand flying to her mouth. "He... he was going to leave me here to take the blame for the title fraud?"
Miller looked at her with the cold, unblinking disdain of a federal law enforcement officer who had spent twenty years watching white-collar criminals realize they were just pawns.
"He left your signature on three forged notarizations, Miss Vance," Miller said flatly. "If your sister hadn't walked into my office yesterday morning with the paper trail, you would have been arrested by county sheriffs on Monday while Lucas was having lunch in an oceanfront villa in Cascais."
Chloe dropped her head back onto the table, sobbing hysterically.
I didn't comfort her. I didn't reach out to touch her trembling shoulders. I looked at Arthur Sterling, who was calmly snapping the cap back onto his fountain pen.
"Is the house clear, Arthur?" I asked.
"The lis pendens has been indexed," Arthur replied, rising from his chair with the deliberate, unhurried grace of an old predator. "The county recorder issued the cancellation order on the fraudulent memorandum forty minutes ago. The title to the Washington Park house is pristine, Clara. It belongs to you, and only you, unencumbered by so much as a shadow."
"Good," I said, picking up my leather tote bag from the floor.
"Where are you going?" Chloe sobbed from the table, looking up through her tears. "Clara, please... don't leave me here with them..."
I stopped at the doorway of the conference room. I looked back at my younger sister—the girl I had shielded from our mother’s bitter moods, the girl whose student loans I had paid off with my first corporate bonus, the girl who had traded my life for her own vanity.
"You wanted to be an adult, Chloe," I said softly, my voice completely devoid of anger, which made it infinitely more terrifying. "You wanted to play with corporate entities and legal seals. Now you get to talk to the United States government about how those seals work. Don't call me again. We don't have anything left to say."
I walked out of the building into the cold Denver rain.
The air was sharp, smelling of pine needles, wet stone, and the distant, clean snow of the Rockies. I climbed into my car, set my phone on the dashboard mount, and plugged it into the charger.
A notification flashed across the screen:
Incoming FaceTime Call: Lucas Vance.
I sat in the idling car for three long seconds. I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. My makeup was perfect. My eyes were clear. There was not a single tear on my face.
May you like
I swiped the green button, set the phone on the mount, and smiled.
"Hey, honey," Lucas's face appeared on the screen, bathed in the golden, luxurious light of the Palm Springs afternoon. "I finally made it through customs in Zurich. How's my favorite girl holding up?"
