Chapter 12 - Harold Vance
Harold Vance agreed to meet only after Detective Ellis informed him that officers were already on their way to his hotel.
He was seventy, silver-haired, and furious in the controlled way wealthy men become furious when they are used to rooms obeying them.
“I have nothing to do with Victoria’s marriage,” he said.
Ellis placed the old Hale Maritime ledger on the table.
“You had something to do with these transactions.”
Harold’s face barely changed.
Barely was enough.
He admitted his company had sold warehouse properties to Hale Maritime years earlier. He denied wrongdoing and claimed the prices were market value.
Then I put Lily’s missing locket on the table.
Police had found it in his hotel safe.
That changed him.
“I didn’t steal that,” he said.
“How did you get it?”
“Victoria gave it to me yesterday.”
“Why?”
He hesitated.
“Because she believed there was a memory card inside.”
I stared at him.
The locket had a thick back plate. I had always assumed it held a photograph.
An evidence technician opened it carefully.
Behind Claire’s picture was a tiny microSD card.
Harold closed his eyes.
“She found out about it from one of Claire’s old emails,” he said. “Victoria thought it contained financial records.”
“You knew she was searching my house?”
“I told her to stop.”
“But you kept the locket.”
His silence answered.
The card contained scanned contracts, bank transfers, and one audio recording.
Claire’s voice filled the hotel room.
“If anything happens before I finish this, Mark needs to know the Vance deals were not clean. Someone inside our company approved them.”
Then another voice answered her.
A man’s voice.
One I recognized instantly.
My chief financial officer, Peter Sloan.
May you like
He was still working for me.
And he had been at my house three nights earlier.
