Chapter 9 - The Accomplice at the Table
|
Through the speaker of my phone came a crystal-clear digital recording captured inside Julian Vance’s private townhome forty-eight hours ago—a recording Julian had secretly made to ensure Diana could never betray him to the feds once I was in the morgue.
"Are you certain the potassium blocker won't show up on the New York medical examiner’s standard tox screen, Julian?" Diana’s own calm, icy voice asked over the recording. "Because if the insurance underwriters delay the thirty-million survivorship payout past Monday noon, my father is finished anyway."
"Dr. Kael’s compound metabolizes into indistinguishable lactic acid within twenty minutes of cardiac arrest, my dear," Julian’s recorded voice replied smoothly over the clink of a scotch glass. "All you have to do is play the grieving fiancée in your silver dress, keep the backup drive taped under your seat until the paramedics wheel him out, and by Tuesday morning you’ll have your thirty million—and I’ll have the controlling voting block."
"Good," Diana’s recorded voice said with a cold little laugh. "Honestly, if I had to listen to Marcus talk about shipping containers for another six months before the June wedding, I would have poisoned him myself."
I clicked the phone off and slid it back into my tuxedo pocket.
On the carpet at my feet, Diana turned the color of wet ashes. Her mouth opened, closed, and opened again without a single sound coming out. Every lie had been stripped away to the bone.
"You were right about one thing, though, Diana," I said quietly, looking down at her frozen face. "Julian never intended to share a dime with you or your father on Monday morning."
I pulled a crime-scene photograph from my folder showing the inside of the black plastic bundle Cole had opened on the sideboard.
"Notice how the forged suicide note in the package wasn't addressed to the board of directors?" I pointed out calmly. "It was addressed to you—confessing that you and I had conspired together to loot the Ellison Global pension fund to cover your father’s Ponzi scheme, and that I took poison at the dinner table because you threatened to expose me. And whose fingerprints were on the outside of the backup poison ampoule inside that pouch? Yours. From when Julian asked you to check the seal on Wednesday."
Diana’s hands flew to her throat as she realized what Julian had actually built.
If I had drunk that champagne and died at the table tonight, Julian wouldn't have waited for Diana to move the package. Julian himself would have "discovered" the black package taped beneath Diana’s chair while the NYPD was still in the dining room. Diana would have been arrested on the spot for first-degree murder and pension fraud, invalidating her thirty-million-dollar survivorship bond immediately, while Julian assumed total control of Ellison Global as the sole untainted partner.
May you like
"That son of a bitch!" Diana screamed, all her upper-crust polish shattering into feral rage as she scrambled to her feet. "He set me up to take a life sentence! Give me a microphone, Marcus—I’ll testify to everything! I know where Julian’s offshore accounts are in the Caymans! I’ll bury him!"
Before I could answer her, the encrypted tactical radio clipped to my guard’s shoulder crackled sharply—followed by the sudden sound of two muffled gunshots from the security office down the hall.
