Chapter 2 - The Paper Trail
The red light of my laptop screen illuminated the kitchen counter until three in the morning.
Veritas Holdings LLC was not a corporation in the traditional sense; it was a shell entity registered out of a strip mall postal box in Naperville. A quick search through Illinois business registry records—accessible through the corporate compliance database I used daily at my firm—revealed that the registered agent wasn't my mother. It was a man named Arthur Vance, a retired bankruptcy attorney whose license had been suspended in 2018 following an ethics investigation involving client trust accounts.
Arthur Vance wasn't just an acquaintance of my family. He was the man who had handled my father’s botched commercial real estate restructuring back when I was in college—the crisis that had first forced me to start funneling my paycheck into household expenses to keep us from losing the suburban house.
By sunrise, I had mapped out every transaction linked to Veritas Holdings over the past forty-eight hours. It wasn't just my grandfather's college fund. There were smaller, systematic transfers originating from accounts I hadn't looked at in years—dormant savings bonds, residual royalties from a small patent my uncle had left behind, and even a mysterious monthly deduction labeled administrative maintenance that had been quietly siphoning two hundred dollars out of my personal checking account every month for the last three years.
They hadn't just taken my vacation money. They had been treating my entire financial history as a revolving credit line for a very long time.
At 8:30 AM, I sat at my desk in the open-plan offices of Meridian Financial Compliance downtown, wearing a sharp charcoal blazer and holding a lukewarm paper cup of black coffee. Across the glass partition, my direct supervisor, David Thorne, looked up from his dual monitors and motioned me into his office.
David was a forty-year veteran of corporate oversight with a mustache that looked like it had survived the Reagan administration and eyes that missed nothing.
"Morning, Claire," he said, flicking a printed audit report across his polished walnut desk. "I saw your access log from last night. You locked down an external transfer at 7:45 PM on a holiday. Everything okay?"
I set my coffee down, keeping my expression neutral. "Family emergency, David. An unauthorized third-party attempt to access personal funds using compromised credentials."
David leaned back, his chair creaking softly. He didn't ask for details about my family—we maintained a strict professional boundary—but he knew my work. In our department, unauthorized access attempts were treated with the gravity of a biological spill.
"Was it external or internal?" he asked, his tone shifting immediately into professional inquiry.
"Internal breach disguised as external," I replied, sliding an encrypted flash drive across the desk. It contained the ledger trail of Veritas Holdings and the IP addresses linked to the Naperville postal box. "Someone close to me used historical authorization to channel funds through a third-party holding company. I've already revoked all credentials, but the pattern suggests a systemic vulnerability that predates last night."
David plugged the drive into his secondary terminal, tapping his fountain pen against his chin as the data streams loaded. His eyebrows lifted fractionally as he scrolled through the shell company filings.
"Arthur Vance," David murmured, reading the registered agent's name. "I know that name. He was disbarred for moving funds between debtor accounts without authorization. If your family is tied up with Vance, Claire, this isn't just a simple family dispute. This is a structured asset concealment scheme."
"I know," I said, my voice unnaturally steady. "And I need to know how deep it goes."
"Well," David said, looking up from the screen with a grim, assessing smile. "You're our senior compliance manager for a reason. If you want to run an internal trace on these accounts using the firm's forensic software, I won't stop you—provided you keep it strictly off the public ledger until we see where the paper leads."
"Thank you, David."
"Don't thank me yet," he warned, pointing the tip of his pen at me. "When people get cornered financially, they don't apologize. They escalate. Make sure your own house is locked down before you start breaking into theirs."
I took the flash drive back and returned to my desk, but I didn't start the forensic trace immediately. Instead, my phone buzzed on the desk. It wasn't my mother or Marcus this time.
May you like
It was an email notification from my younger sister, Brittany, sent from an alternate address I hadn't blocked yet. The subject line was chillingly simple: You forgot about Grandma's cottage.
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