Chương 5
“How much?” I asked.
Daniel’s eyes stayed on the page.
“Just over eleven million dollars.”
The number felt unreal.
I shook my head.
“That’s impossible.”
“The transfers go back six years.”
“I’ve never received eleven million dollars.”
“It’s not a distribution account.”
Daniel looked at me carefully.
“It’s an asset account under the trust.”
“What asset?”
He slid one page free.
“Shares.”
My mouth went dry.
“Shares of what?”
Daniel handed me the document.
At the top was a company name I had never seen before.
Aurelius Diagnostics Holdings.
Below it was an ownership table.
The Hale Family Trust owned thirty-two percent.
Brightwell owned eighteen.
Two offshore entities owned the rest.
Grant moved beside me.
I could feel him reading over my shoulder.
Then he whispered, “That company doesn’t exist anymore.”
Daniel looked at him.
“You know it?”
Grant did not answer.
“Grant.”
He took the page from my hands.
His face had gone white.
“Aurelius bought the patents.”
“What patents?”
He looked at me.
“The original Vela software architecture.”
My father’s infusion platform.
The product he had supposedly been investigating in secret.
I stared at the ownership table.
“Why would my trust own part of a company holding Northstar patents?”
Grant looked toward the NICU doors as if the answer might be easier on the other side.
Daniel closed the folder.
“That is exactly what Evelyn wants to know.”
My phone vibrated.
Lena again.
This time there was no attachment.
Only one sentence.
Do not let Grant leave until I show you who authorized the trust acquisition.
I read Lena’s message twice before looking up.
Grant was still holding the Aurelius ownership page.
Daniel noticed my expression.
“What?”
“Lena says Grant can’t leave yet.”
Grant gave a tired, incredulous laugh.
“My son is in intensive care.”
“She didn’t say you can’t see him.”
“Then what exactly does she think she’s entitled to demand?”
“I don’t know.”
I typed back with both thumbs.
Where are you?
The reply appeared almost immediately.
Parking garage.
Level three.
I looked at Daniel.
“She’s here.”
Grant’s shoulders stiffened.
“At the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I assume because whatever she found mattered enough not to email.”
He handed the Aurelius page back to Daniel.
“I’m not going to a parking garage while my child is behind those doors.”
“No one asked you to.”
“You just said she told you not to let me leave.”
“I’m not your jailer, Grant.”
“Could have fooled me tonight.”
Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Can we not do this in front of the NICU?”
A nurse opened the secured doors and stepped into the hallway.
“Mr. Hale?”
Grant turned so quickly that the hostility vanished from him.
“Yes.”
“You can come in now.”
He looked at me.
The question was there before he asked it.
“Claire.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
His mouth closed.
The nurse waited.
Grant nodded once and followed her through the doors.
The lock clicked behind him.
Daniel sat in the chair Grant had vacated.
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
I looked at him.
“That seems unrelated.”
“It is.”
He loosened his tie.
“I’m trying not to become a person who thinks every sentence has to be about fraud.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
He pointed toward a vending machine alcove at the end of the hallway.
“I saw crackers.”
“You’re general counsel of a medical technology company.”
“That does not make hospital crackers less nutritious.”
“It arguably makes your standards worse.”
“Come downstairs with me.”
I checked my phone.
“Lena is in the garage.”
“Exactly.”
We took the elevator down.
Neither of us spoke until the doors opened into the parking structure.
The concrete air smelled damp and metallic.
Lena Ortiz stood beside a gray rental car with her laptop bag over one shoulder and a paper cup in her hand.
She was wearing black slacks, running shoes, and the expression of a woman who had been awake too long and regretted everyone else’s existence.
“You look terrible,” she told me.
“Thank you.”
“I mean that clinically.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Neither are you, and yet here we are.”
Daniel held up a packet of vending-machine crackers.
“I have dinner.”
Lena stared at them.
“That explains why corporate lawyers look embalmed.”
Daniel opened the packet.
“Can we get to the document?”
She set her coffee on the roof of the rental car.
“Yes.”
Then she looked at me.
“I need you to understand something before I show you this.”
“No speeches.”
“It isn’t a speech.”
“It sounds like the beginning of one.”
She exhaled through her nose.
“Fine.”
Lena opened her laptop.
“The trust acquisition of Aurelius was authorized electronically five years and eleven months ago.”
I folded my arms.
“By Grant?”
“No.”
“Melissa?”
“No.”
She rotated the laptop toward me.
The authorization screen showed my name.
For a moment, all I could hear was a car alarm chirping somewhere on the level below us.
“That’s not possible.”
“It used your credentials.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“I believe you.”
Daniel leaned closer to the screen.
“What authentication method?”
“Password plus challenge response.”
I looked at Lena.
“What challenge?”
She clicked into an archived audit log.
“Mother’s maiden name.”
My stomach tightened.
Daniel stopped chewing.
Grant knew my mother’s maiden name.
So did half the people who had attended our wedding.
“So someone answered a security question.”
“Not just someone.”
Lena clicked again.
“The login originated from a residential IP address associated at the time with your father’s lake house.”
I stared at the numbers.
“My father was dead by then.”
“Yes.”
The word sat between us.
I stepped closer.
“When?”
“Four months after his funeral.”
I felt suddenly cold.
“No one was living there.”
“Someone was using the internet.”
Daniel wiped cracker salt from his fingers and reached for the laptop.
“Can you verify the attribution?”
“I already did.”
“ISP records?”
“Historical billing and preserved access logs.”
“Those logs shouldn’t still exist.”
“They weren’t preserved by the ISP.”
May you like
She looked at him.
“Northstar preserved them.”
