Chapter 4 - The Restaurant Was Never Just a Restaurant
Police traced the threatening text to a prepaid phone that went dark seconds after sending it.
Ortiz ordered a patrol car outside the hospital.
I wanted to stay beside Claire, but she insisted I go with the detectives back to the restaurant.
“Find out why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“Why me.”
Inside the room, crime-scene technicians photographed everything.
A locked medicine cabinet.
A stack of disposable food containers.
A cheap camera mounted above the door.
And dozens of printed photographs of my family.
Emma leaving school.
Claire grocery shopping.
Me entering the bank.
Our house at night.
“This wasn’t improvised,” Ortiz said.
I stared at a photo of Claire pushing Emma on a swing.
“How long?”
“Months before she disappeared, at least.”
A technician called us into Vanessa’s office.
Behind a false panel beneath the desk was a second computer tower.
Its hard drive contained spreadsheets.
At first, the numbers meant nothing to me.
Then I saw the company name.
Mercer Food Holdings.
My company.
My father had started it with one grocery store thirty-two years earlier. By the time he died, we supplied restaurants and hotels across three states. I owned sixty percent. Claire owned ten percent through a trust my father had created after our marriage.
Vanessa’s restaurant was one of our clients.
The spreadsheets showed invoices from Mercer Food Holdings that I had never seen.
Huge ones.
Payments routed to shell vendors.
Refunds approved under Claire’s employee credentials.
“Claire never worked in accounting,” I said.
Ortiz leaned closer.
“But somebody wanted it to look like she did.”
Then a technician opened a scanned document.
It was a shareholder transfer agreement.
Claire’s ten percent ownership transferred to Vanessa Crane.
Signed two days after Claire disappeared.
The signature was convincing.
But Claire had been locked behind the freezer when it was supposedly signed.
Ortiz looked at me.
“That gives us a financial motive.”
I shook my head.
“For ten percent?”
The technician clicked the next file.
A second agreement appeared.
If Claire died or was legally declared absent for twelve months, her shares would not return to me.
They would transfer to a private holding company.
The owner of that company was hidden behind three layers of registrations.
May you like
But the mailing address was familiar.
It belonged to my older brother, Mark.
