From the house sale, I followed the money. Five hundred thousand dollars in equity, liquidated and wired into a holding account under the name Apex Consulting LLC.
“Have you ever heard of Apex Consulting?” I asked Anna one evening as we sat amidst the sea of papers.
She squinted at the document I handed her. “No. Mark worked in logistics. He didn’t do consulting.”
I smiled grimly. “Look at the registered agent.”
She read the fine print, and her breath caught. “Vanessa Sterling.”
“Exactly,” I said, tapping the paper. “They didn’t just steal the money. They laundered it through her shell company to purchase the penthouse, completely hiding the assets from the divorce proceedings Mark secretly initiated in a different county.”
It was a textbook asset concealment scheme, executed with sloppy overconfidence. Mark thought because Anna had no money for a lawyer, no one would ever bother to look under the hood.
But I needed the nail in the coffin. Paper trails are circumstantial without a witness to tie the noose. I needed Carl Voss.
It took me three days to track the rat to a run-down betting parlor on the south side of the city. He was a sweaty, nervous man in a cheap suit, nursing a watered-down whiskey and a stack of losing tickets.
I slid into the booth across from him, blocking his exit. I didn’t introduce myself. I just slid a manila envelope across the sticky table.
Voss looked up, annoyed. “I ain’t taking new clients. Beat it, pops.”
“Open it, Carl.”
Something in my voice made him hesitate. He wiped his sweaty palms on his slacks and peeled open the flap. Inside were clear, high-resolution photographs of him, Mark Ellis, and Vanessa sitting in a coffee shop at the airport, timestamped three days before the house was sold. The next photo was a copy of the forged deed. The third was a drafted, unsigned indictment for felony conspiracy and wire fraud, with his name bolded at the top.
Voss turned the color of spoiled milk. “What… what is this? Who are you?”
“I’m Anna Ellis’s father,” I said, leaning in close so he could smell the peppermint on my breath and see the absolute lack of mercy in my eyes. “And you are the man who helped steal her life.”
“I didn’t know!” he stammered, looking around frantically for an exit. “He just paid me a grand to stamp the paper! He said she was in rehab and couldn’t be there!”
