Chapter 10 - The Woman in the Green Coat
Three days after I left the house, I received the first image of the parking garage evidence.
Detective Brooks had obtained approval to show me a still while confirming an identification.
Vanessa's silver Porsche occupied the center of the frame.
The person standing beside it wore a long green coat and had a ring of keys in one hand.
It wasn't me.
It wasn't Vanessa.
It was a woman I had seen only twice in my life.
Rebecca Sloan, Malcolm Vale's personal operations director.
I remembered her from a charity event because she'd spent the entire evening correcting the placement of table cards.
She had the meticulous impatience of someone who lived by instructions.
The detective asked whether I was certain.
"Yes."
The image showed Rebecca entering the parking aisle twenty-two minutes after my departure.
The damaged door was partly concealed by a concrete column, so the still did not prove she made the scratch.
But it destroyed Vanessa's account that she'd watched me do it.
Brooks explained that an adjacent camera and access records could establish more.
What troubled me most was the timing.
Rebecca had arrived only after Melissa was instructed to summon me.
The machinery had been moving all afternoon.
That evening Charlotte came to my temporary apartment with an update on the signature forgery.
The scanned image had been embedded in a PDF produced by a document service contracted through Vale Capital.
The version history contained a user account associated with Rebecca.
"They were sloppy," I said.
"They were rushing," Charlotte corrected.
"Why now?"
She spread three documents across the kitchen table.
The company faced a debt covenant deadline within the week.
A major lender had refused an extension unless the rescue funding was legally confirmed.
Malcolm could not simply wait another month.
He needed a closing immediately.
And he needed his undisclosed fee to survive the closing review.
I understood the pressure, but not the scale of the deception.
"What was the fee?"
Charlotte hesitated.
"We found the annex."
She pointed to the figure.
Two hundred and forty million dollars.
The amount had been disguised as transaction expenses and consulting allocations.
I stared at it.
"Two hundred and forty million for introducing a deal he didn't fund?"
"And assigning portions of it to entities he controls."
The room felt suddenly smaller.
Malcolm wasn't trying to take the entire rescue package out the front door.
He was trying to siphon enough from it to secure his own empire before anyone noticed.
Then Charlotte showed me the beneficiary schedule.
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One of the entities named as a recipient was registered to Adrian Cole.
