Chapter 6 - Unearthing the Past
While Marcus Vance prepared our legal briefs, the private investigative agency he hired—Cascade Risk Solutions—spent eighteen hours tearing through Gregory Miller’s personal and business history.
What they uncovered went far beyond simple business failure.
At ten that night, Marcus forwarded a confidential report to my tablet. I sat by the fire, reading through the digital dossier under the quiet crackle of the wood.
Gregory hadn’t lost his contracting business due to market downturns or inflation. He had systematically dismantled it through compulsive high-stakes gambling and illegal diversion of funds.
According to bank records obtained through subpoena-backed discovery in an unrelated Washington County proceeding, Gregory had made seventy-two visits to the Ilani Casino in Ridgefield, Washington, over the preceding fourteen months. He had withdrawn over two hundred and ten thousand dollars from his corporate payroll accounts at casino ATMs.
To cover the mounting losses, Gregory had begun operating a classic construction Ponzi scheme. He took fifty-percent deposits on high-end residential kitchen remodels in affluent Portland neighborhoods like Lake Oswego and West Linn, used that cash to pay off previous subcontractors who were threatening to file liens, and then abandoned the new jobs before swinging a hammer.
Three weeks ago, the Oregon Construction Contractors Board (CCB) had issued an emergency suspension of his commercial and residential licenses.
Even more damning was the trail of predatory borrowing.
Two days before he arrived at my parents’ house in Cannon Beach, Gregory had signed a confession of judgment with an unregulated merchant cash advance lender in Florida. The interest rate was an astonishing one hundred and forty percent. To secure the loan, Gregory had listed personal assets he didn't own—including a fictitious forty-percent equity stake in *The Sinclair Coastal Estate, Cannon Beach, Oregon*.
“He didn't just want to live here,” I said aloud to the empty room.
Marcus’s investigator had attached a series of text messages recovered from Gregory’s business phone, obtained through a pending civil discovery motion filed by one of his defrauded clients.
In one message, sent to an associate four days before he packed his truck for Cannon Beach, Gregory wrote:
> *“The old man is soft. He’s seventy-four and can barely walk without his back locking up. I get Samuel to sign the quitclaim under the guise of an estate plan, I flip the property to an LLC, pull a six-hundred-thousand-dollar cash-out bridge loan, pay off the Florida guys, and leave the old folks in the guest suite. Lucas is in Portland running his tech fund. He won’t do shit. He avoids family drama.”*
I stared at the screen.
*He won’t do shit.*
Gregory had mistaken my professional restraint for weakness. He had mistaken my parents’ quiet gratitude for helplessness. He believed that because our family didn't scream, didn't fight at Thanksgiving, and didn't boast on social media, we were sheep waiting to be sheared.
I closed the file, picked up my phone, and forwarded the entire package directly to Sarah Jenkins at the Clatsop County District Attorney’s office, along with a copy to Marcus Vance.
Then I called the security company I had hired the previous day.
“Captain Davis?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Sinclair.”
“Have your guards set up twenty-four-hour perimeter monitoring around the Cannon Beach house starting tonight. Two men on site, armed, with instructions to detain anyone entering the driveway without my direct written authorization.”
“Understood, sir. We’re on site now.”
I walked out onto the porch. The ocean was black beneath an overcast sky, the great waves roaring out of the darkness and shattering into white foam against the sand. The air was cold, pure, and heavy with salt.
Gregory Miller thought he was playing a game of family leverage.
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Tomorrow morning, in the historic stone courthouse in Astoria, he was going to find out what happens when you attempt to take everything from people who spent their entire lives building it with their own hands.
***
