Chapter 16 - The Nineteen-Year-Old
Connor denied it.
Violently.
When Naomi confronted him, he slammed both hands against the interview table.
“I was nineteen.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I didn’t hire Raymond to kill my father.”
“Did you know Raymond?”
Connor stopped.
That was enough.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“My mother introduced us.”
“When?”
“When I was seventeen.”
Raymond had acted as a private driver and security guard for the Ward family.
Thomas hated him.
Connor claimed his father believed Raymond was spying for Elaine.
Two weeks before Thomas died, Connor asked Raymond to follow him.
“Why?”
“I thought Dad was cheating.”
Naomi stared.
“Who told you that?”
Connor closed his eyes.
“My mother.”
There it was.
Elaine again.
“She told me Dad was planning to leave us.”
Connor’s voice became smaller.
“I wanted proof.”
“So you paid Raymond?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“You instructed the man to follow your father days before his death.”
“I didn’t tell him to hurt anyone.”
But Thomas did not know that.
He only knew Raymond was following him.
He believed Connor had become part of Elaine’s scheme.
My father’s recording reflected Thomas’s fear, not necessarily the truth.
For the first time, Connor looked less like a mastermind and more like a man who had spent his entire life letting his mother rewrite reality.
It did not absolve him.
He had eventually chosen greed himself.
But the pattern started early.
Elaine planted suspicion.
Then offered a solution.
Then used the resulting guilt as leverage.
Brenda.
Dana.
Allison.
Connor.
Different traps.
Same design.
That realization unlocked something.
I remembered a note from my father’s box.
Do not believe the story Elaine tells her children.
Maybe he had not been warning only about Thomas.
Maybe he had recognized Elaine’s method.
I returned to the box.
One document seemed meaningless before.
A list of six bank account numbers from twenty years earlier.
Marcus compared them against the financial structures used in the current fraud.
Two routing patterns matched.
Not exact accounts.
The same offshore intermediary.
Elaine had rebuilt the current scheme using the architecture of her original theft.
That was her weakness.
People repeat what once worked.
Naomi traced the historic intermediary.
A records archive showed a dormant trust established under the name E.M. Holdings.
Elaine Margaret Ward.
The trust still existed.
And somebody had reactivated it eleven months earlier.
The same month Connor began removing me from Apex’s systems.
Money from Northstar Meridian had passed through it.
Then out again.
Where?
A private aviation company.
Three charter flights.
One yacht broker.
And a property management company in Belize.
Elaine had prepared an escape.
A charter reservation existed for Friday night.
Four passengers.
Departure from a private airfield.
Destination Nassau.
From there, another aircraft could leave U.S. jurisdiction.
Names were not listed.
But Naomi smiled for the first time in days.
“We finally know where she has to be.”
Friday.
The same day as the trust review.
Elaine planned to finish the transfer.
Then disappear.
May you like
We had less than thirty-six hours.
And this time, instead of chasing her, we could make her come to us.
