Before my wife died, before I retreated to the quiet life of a pensioned widower, I had been the lead forensic fraud investigator for the state attorney’s office. I spent thirty years hunting white-collar predators. Men who wore bespoke suits and stole millions with the stroke of a pen. Men who ruined lives without ever getting their hands dirty.
Men exactly like Mark.
They had all smiled at me in the beginning. They thought they were smarter. They thought their money made them untouchable.
They never smiled after I was done with them.
I reached into the safe, bypassing the gun, and pulled out a blank, thick red folder. I walked over to my heavy oak desk, grabbed a thick black Sharpie, and wrote a name on the tab in block letters.
MARK ELLIS.
I walked back into the living room and dropped the folder onto the coffee table in front of Anna. It landed with a heavy smack.
She stared at it, her eyes wide, the color slowly draining from her face.
I looked at my daughter, the rage inside me finally condensing into something cold, sharp, and highly functional. “He made a critical error, Anna,” I said quietly. “If he wanted to destroy you, he should have left you on my doorstep. He left you on the street. He left you for dead.”
I tapped the red folder. “And I do not forgive the dead.”
The next two weeks were a blur of caffeine, eye strain, and the familiar, intoxicating rhythm of the hunt. I converted my dining room into a war room. Corkboards leaned against the floral wallpaper, strung with red yarn connecting printouts of shell companies, wire transfers, and property deeds.
Anna spent the first few days sleeping, her body finally surrendering to the exhaustion it had held at bay. When she woke, she was fragile, but the hollow look in her eyes had been replaced by a flickering ember of anger. That was good. Anger we could use. Despair was useless.
I started with the house. I accessed public property records through a backdoor portal my old partner at the DA’s office conveniently forgot to revoke my access to. The quitclaim deed was a masterpiece of arrogance. Mark hadn’t just forged her signature; he had used a notary public who was practically a ghost.
Carl Voss. I ran the name through the state database. Voss was a disgraced former paralegal whose notary license had been suspended three years ago for—predictably—document fraud. Mark had found a bottom-feeder willing to stamp a lie for the right price.
