Chapter 11 - CHARLES’S LAST MOVE
Three weeks passed.
Hargrove Industries survived.
Barely.
The canceled merger sent the stock price falling.
Three directors resigned.
Two executives were arrested.
Reporters camped outside headquarters.
Ethan held a press conference.
He did something every advisor told him not to do.
He told the truth.
“My family helped build this company.”
“My family also made serious mistakes.”
“I will not protect those mistakes simply because the people who made them share my name.”
The statement cost the company millions.
It also saved it.
Employees began cooperating.
More records surfaced.
More accounts were discovered.
Charles’s network collapsed piece by piece.
Then, on a Thursday afternoon, Ethan received a call.
Charles Mercer had been released pending trial.
Grace stared at him.
“How?”
“His attorneys challenged part of the evidence.”
“Is he free?”
“Temporarily.”
That evening security around the house doubled.
At 11:12 p.m., a black sedan stopped across the road.
Ethan watched from the window.
“Stay upstairs.”
Grace shook her head.
“No.”
“Grace.”
“I spent enough time hiding because of these people.”
The sedan remained for three minutes.
Then drove away.
Security recorded the plate.
It belonged to a rental company.
The driver used false identification.
The next morning Ethan received an envelope.
Inside was a single photograph.
It showed him and Grace sitting on their porch the previous evening.
Written across the back were five words.
YOU SHOULD HAVE SIGNED IT.
Ethan called the investigators.
Grace stared at the photograph.
“He wants us afraid.”
“He succeeded.”
She looked at Ethan.
“No.”
She tore the photograph in half.
“He succeeded before.”
“When we didn’t know who he was.”
“Now we do.”
That afternoon, Martin arrived.
Anna was with him.
She looked exhausted but determined.
“I remembered something.”
She placed a small notebook on the table.
“When Charles held me at the waterfront house, he made calls.”
“I wrote down everything I could hear.”
Numbers.
Dates.
Fragments of names.
One entry caught Ethan’s attention.
R.S. — Exit payment after merger.
Grace looked at him.
“Rebecca Sloan.”
Martin nodded.
“There’s a number beside it.”
Investigators traced the number.
It belonged to a storage facility forty miles north.
Police arrived there two hours later.
Rebecca Sloan was inside.
She surrendered without resistance.
And when she realized Charles had abandoned her, she started talking.
By midnight, prosecutors had enough evidence to request Charles’s immediate arrest.
But when officers reached his apartment, Charles was gone.
On his desk they found only one thing.
May you like
A photograph of the Hargrove mansion.
A red circle had been drawn around the nursery window.
