Chapter 15 - THE GHOST IN THE SYSTEM
The safe house plunged into an icy, suffocating silence.
"Dead?" Adam choked out, stumbling back against the wall. "How? If Julian planned this, why would he kill himself hours before the deadline?"
"He didn't kill himself," Leah said, her paramedic instincts piercing through the chaos. "A man who orchestrates the murder of a child to inherit billions doesn't put a bullet in his own head hours before he claims the prize. Someone cleaned him up. Julian wasn't the mastermind—he was just a pawn. Or someone else wanted the Sterling fortune even more than he did."
Jordan hurried into the room from the adjoining tech station, his laptop open. His eyes were wide behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
"I managed to hack into Julian’s encrypted email server before the police forensics team seized it," Jordan said out of breath. "Julian didn't have the money to hire that caliber of contract sniper. Julian was completely bankrupt! He had lost over two hundred million dollars in bad offshore crypto investments to a consortium known as Apex Horizon."
"Who owns Apex Horizon?" Adam asked, his voice shaking with dread.
Jordan clicked a key, pulling up corporate registry documents from Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. "Apex Horizon is an anonymous holding trust. But their primary real estate asset in this city... their flagship investment where all their underground money gets laundered through private memberships..."
Jordan turned the screen toward Leah and Adam.
On the screen was the architectural blueprint of a familiar building with grand golden arches and crystal chandeliers.
"The Gilded Room," Leah gasped. "The restaurant."
"Not just the restaurant," Jordan said, zooming in on the deed of ownership. "The entire multi-block luxury complex. And the majority shareholder of Apex Horizon isn't an offshore ghost. It’s someone who was standing in the Gilded Room during the apology dinner two days ago."
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A photograph expanded on the screen.
It was Evelyn Vance—the soft-spoken, seemingly remorseful restaurant manager who had tearfully promised that safety would always come before profit.
