Daniel’s hand closed around the phone.
Everything inside him became still.
“Say her name again.”
Victor did not.
“Lily leaves school at three fifteen.”
Daniel stood.
“You go near my daughter and nothing you want from me will matter anymore.”
“That sounded almost like a threat.”
“It was information.”
Victor laughed again.
“There he is.”
Daniel’s voice dropped.
“You want the files?”
“I want what you kept from Richard.”
That confirmed it.
Victor knew.
Not everything.
Enough.
Daniel looked at the handwritten memo inside the box.
“You don’t know what I kept.”
“Then why did you hide for fifteen years?”
“I stopped caring about your company.”
“No. You stopped trusting Richard.”
Daniel said nothing.
Victor continued.
“And that is why I know you found the second ledger.”
The line went dead.
Daniel remained standing.
The second ledger.
Nobody had ever used that phrase outside the original investigation.
Not Richard.
Not federal agents.
Not Sarah.
Only Daniel.
And one other person.
A junior finance analyst named Helen Mercer.
Helen had helped Daniel trace shell payments.
Three days before she was supposed to testify, she disappeared.
Police found her car at an airport.
A ticket had been purchased to Mexico.
Everyone assumed she fled.
Daniel never believed it.
He sat down slowly.
Victor Lang was alive.
But Victor was not the only person who knew about the second ledger.
That meant one of two things.
Helen was alive too.
Or somebody had gotten to her before she disappeared.
At 2:04, Daniel called Victoria.
She answered immediately.
“Where are you?”
“A secure residence my father owns.”
“Who knows you’re there?”
“My father, his security chief, and me.”
“Name of the security chief?”
“Martin Keene.”
Daniel closed his eyes.
Of course.
“What?”
Victoria heard the silence.
“Daniel?”
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Now.”
“Martin has worked for my father for twenty years.”
“Exactly.”
Victoria stood.
“Explain.”
Daniel looked again at the old photograph.
In the background, barely visible behind Richard and Daniel, stood a younger Martin Keene.
Not security chief then.
Operations security coordinator.
One of the few people with access to both physical facilities and system logs during the original scandal.
“Fifteen years ago, someone wiped access records before federal investigators could recover them.”
Victoria went still.
“You think Martin did it?”
“I think he had the access.”
“That isn’t proof.”
“No.”
Daniel grabbed his keys.
“But staying where he knows you are is a stupid way to wait for proof.”
Across town, Victoria left the guest room and found Richard still awake in the study.
“We’re leaving.”
Richard looked up.
“Why?”
“Daniel says Martin may be compromised.”
Richard stared at her.
“That’s impossible.”
“So was Victor being alive.”
Richard rose slowly.
“Martin saved my life during the investigation.”
Victoria stopped.
“How?”
“Someone tried to break into my home. Martin found them first.”
“Did police confirm that?”
Richard’s expression changed.
“No.”
“Did anyone?”
“I trusted him.”
Victoria said the next sentence gently.
“That seems to be how this began.”
Richard looked as though she had struck him.
Then the lights went out.