Chapter 3 - The Audit of the Lost Will
By 9:00 a.m. the following morning, the corporate offices of Campbell Construction were quiet, but the boardroom table was completely buried beneath stacks of public land registries, medical insurance fraud files, and ancient probate records.
My attorney, Rebecca Stone, sat opposite me, her glasses resting on the tip of her nose as she cross-referenced the state's missing person reports.
"The architecture of their fraud is staggering, Sadie," Rebecca said, sliding a thick, red folder across the polished glass table. "In 1986, your grandfather, Arthur Davis, was the sole owner of Davis Ironworks—a company that held the commercial patents for half the structural steel used in the state capital. He had an estimated net worth of thirty million dollars."
"And my father?"
"Gregory was a junior partner who had been caught siphoning funds to cover his personal real estate losses," Rebecca explained. "According to the original, physical copy of Arthur’s will—which we managed to extract from a private vault in Cincinnati last night—Arthur had planned to completely disinherit Gregory. He left ninety percent of the ironworks shares and the Columbus estate directly to a trust established for his future grandchildren. Specifically, to you, Sadie."
I stared at the yellowed parchment, my grandfather’s bold, elegant signature staring back at me from the bottom of the page.
"To prevent the will from entering probate, Gregory and Brenda staged a private mental incompetency hearing," Rebecca continued, her voice dropping into a cold, clinical disgust. "They hired a corrupt family physician to declare Arthur suffering from severe, regressive dementia. They closed the ironworks, moved the assets into a shell company registered in Delaware, and reported to the extended family that Arthur had passed away in an offshore care facility."
"But he was upstairs the entire time," I whispered, my hand touching the fresh bandage over my eyebrow. "They kept him locked in the second-story suite for forty years, using his digital signature to authorize the month-by-month asset transfers until the trust was nearly drained."
"They needed Wyatt's money because the Delaware shell company just ran into a massive federal tax audit," Wyatt added, stepping into the room with a stack of bank notifications. "The state treasury flagged the transfers three weeks ago. Gregory was desperate to marry Melanie off to me so he could use my construction firm's capital reserves to mask the embezzlement before the grand jury convened."
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"They thought that if they broke my face, you would walk away, Wyatt," I said, a cold, hard resolve settling over my soul.
"They picked the wrong family to break, Sadie," Wyatt said, his eyes flashing with an unyielding fire. "The federal marshals are already moving on the house. We are going to get your grandfather out."
