Chapter 10 - OLIVIA’S FINAL LIE
Olivia was taken to a private room before reporters saw her.
She placed both hands over her stomach.
Mary remained near the door.
“Are you pregnant?”
Olivia nodded.
“Fourteen weeks.”
“Does Ethan know?”
“He believes the baby is his.”
Mary felt anger rise again.
“Is it?”
“No.”
Olivia sat slowly.
“The father is Daniel Ross.”
Daniel was Cole Development’s former financial controller.
He had resigned six months earlier after accusing Charles of manipulating construction accounts.
Two weeks later, Daniel disappeared from public view.
Olivia claimed she had been seeing him before Ethan.
When Daniel discovered the forged invoices, he asked Olivia to help expose them.
She refused.
Ethan then convinced her Daniel planned to implicate both of them.
Shortly afterward, Daniel vanished.
“Where is he?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Ethan told me Daniel took money and escaped to Canada.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I wanted to.”
Mary’s eyes hardened.
“That sentence seems to excuse everything in this family.”
Olivia began to cry.
“Daniel left me a voicemail the night he disappeared.”
“I deleted it because Ethan was beside me.”
“But Ethan’s phone automatically saved a copy through the company backup system.”
Rebecca searched the recovered files.
She found the message.
Daniel’s voice sounded rushed.
Olivia, Charles knows I copied the Blackridge ledger.
I am meeting Thomas Whitmore tomorrow.
If anything happens to me, the files are under the north tower.
Mary leaned toward the speaker.
Her father had been planning to meet Daniel.
The Blackridge project included two unfinished luxury towers on the riverfront.
The north tower had been sealed for structural repairs.
Cole Development claimed construction stopped because of financial shortages.
Rebecca checked the dates.
Daniel disappeared six days before Thomas died.
Police searched his apartment at the time.
They never searched the tower.
Mary contacted investigators.
By late afternoon, officers entered the abandoned construction site.
They found Daniel’s car behind a false wall inside the underground loading area.
The driver’s seat was stained with old blood.
There was no body.
Inside the trunk, they found financial records proving Charles had diverted more than ninety million dollars from Whitmore-backed projects.
They also found a damaged laptop.
Its hard drive contained one partially recovered video.
Daniel appeared on the screen.
His face was bruised.
He looked directly at the camera.
“If Mary Whitmore sees this, her father was right.”
“Ethan is not protecting her.”
“He is preparing to replace her.”
A loud sound came from behind Daniel.
He turned.
The video ended.
Investigators searched the rest of the tower.
On the forty-second floor, behind a temporary wall, they discovered a locked room.
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Someone had recently been living inside it.
A cup of coffee on the table was still warm.
