Chapter 6 - The Woman With My Badge
The woman in the Duluth video had my height, my hair color, and a coat almost identical to one I owned in 2023.
She did not have my face.
That was the first thing I saw when the forensic lab sent a secure still image.
The second thing I saw was that she was Charlotte.
Her hair was darker then.
Her face was partially turned from the camera.
But I recognized the narrow gold watch she wore every day at SwiftFreight.
"She used my badge," I said.
Daniel enlarged the frame.
The access credential hanging from her neck displayed my old company photograph.
I had not seen that badge in years.
When Gavin and I married, I spent six months helping SwiftFreight with lease negotiations and a financing package.
The company had issued me a temporary executive badge.
I returned it to Gavin's assistant when the work ended.
At least I thought I had.
"Who was his assistant then?" Naomi asked.
"A woman named Karen Lee."
"Still employed?"
"No."
Daniel searched a personnel index.
"She left three months after the Duluth incident."
"Reason?"
"Voluntary resignation."
I remembered Karen as careful, efficient, and terrified of Gavin's temper.
She once called me at midnight because he had thrown a phone against a conference-room wall and she wanted to know whether she should cancel his next morning's meeting.
At the time, I told her Gavin was under pressure.
I had spent years translating his behavior into kinder language.
I no longer had the energy for translation.
Naomi located Karen through a professional registry and sent a neutral request for contact through counsel.
We did not tell her why.
Meanwhile, the forensic team continued reviewing the Duluth footage.
At 11:14 p.m. on the night before Luis Ortega died, Gavin entered the site with Mason and Charlotte.
Charlotte wore my badge.
At 11:21, the three disappeared into a temporary project office.
At 11:46, a contractor entered the same office.
The contractor was Luis Ortega.
At 12:03, Luis left alone.
He looked angry.
At 12:08, Gavin followed him into the construction area.
The camera did not capture audio.
It did capture Gavin grabbing Luis by the arm.
Luis pulled away.
Mason stepped between them.
Then the men moved beyond the camera's view.
Nothing on the footage showed the later accident.
The official incident occurred almost twenty hours afterward.
But the video proved Gavin had a confrontation with Luis shortly before the suspicious $14 million transfer.
"What was Luis responsible for?" I asked.
Daniel had already found the answer.
"Quality control for structural steel."
"So he would know whether remediation was actually needed."
"Yes."
"And whether fourteen million dollars of work had been performed."
"Yes."
The implication was ugly, but implication was not evidence.
We needed records, not imagination.
At 1:30 p.m., Karen Lee called Naomi back.
She agreed to speak only if her current employer was not contacted.
Naomi placed the call on speaker with Karen's permission to record.
Her voice trembled when I introduced myself.
"I hoped you would never find me."
That was not the greeting I expected.
"Why?"
"Because I should have told you."
"Told me what?"
There was a long silence.
"Your badge went missing six weeks before Duluth."
"I returned it to you."
"I know."
"Then how did Charlotte get it?"
Karen started crying quietly.
"Mr. Pierce asked for it."
"Gavin?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"He said security needed to test old credentials before a system upgrade."
"Did you believe him?"
"At first."
"What changed?"
Karen breathed in.
"A week later, I saw Charlotte wearing it in the executive elevator."
"Charlotte was already working there?"
"As a contractor."
I had not known that.
Gavin introduced Charlotte to me eighteen months later as the new public relations director.
He had acted as if they had barely met.
"Why did you not tell me?"
"I tried to tell him I was uncomfortable."
"Him?"
"Mr. Pierce."
"What did he say?"
Another silence.
"He said if I interfered in his marriage, he would make sure I never worked in Minneapolis again."
Naomi wrote something on a legal pad.
"Karen, did you preserve any messages or emails relating to the badge?"
"One email."
"Why one?"
"Because after Luis died, I became scared."
"Scared of what?"
"That I had helped them create evidence."
My stomach tightened.
"What evidence?"
"The access report."
She explained that SwiftFreight's system automatically logged badge entries.
After the Duluth incident, Mason requested a report of every person who had entered the site during the previous forty-eight hours.
My badge appeared on the list.
Karen knew I had not been there.
She told Mason the credential had been issued to someone else temporarily.
Mason ordered her to remove that note before sending the report to insurers.
"Did you?" Naomi asked.
"Yes."
Her voice broke.
"I was afraid."
"Do you still have the original?"
"No."
"What about the email?"
"I forwarded it to a personal account before I resigned."
The email arrived fifteen minutes later.
It was from Gavin.
Subject: LEGACY BADGE TEST.
The message instructed Karen to give Sabrina Miller's old badge to Charlotte Gable and not deactivate it until directed.
That single email changed everything.
Gavin could no longer plausibly claim Charlotte had used my identity without his knowledge.
He had ordered access to it.
At 3:05 p.m., Crestview's investment committee held an emergency call.
I was not invited.
I should not have been.
This was their money, their fiduciary responsibility, and their decision.
Evelyn returned forty minutes later.
"The hold is extended indefinitely."
I sat very still.
"Does Gavin know?"
"He will in five minutes."
"Will Crestview withdraw?"
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because the company may be salvageable even if management is not."
That sentence mattered.
SwiftFreight employed thousands of people and moved food, medical supplies, and industrial goods across twelve states.
If Gavin had corrupted the company, removing him could be better than destroying it.
"What would Crestview require?"
"Independent investigation, board control over records, and possibly management changes before any investment discussion resumes."
"Gavin will never agree."
Evelyn looked at me.
"Then Gavin may learn the difference between owning stock and owning everyone in the room."
At 4:12 p.m., my attorney received a new filing from Gavin's divorce counsel.
He was asking a judge to enforce the agreement I had signed and to restrain me from making what he called defamatory statements concerning SwiftFreight.
Attached were photographs of the signed pages.
Naomi read them and frowned.
"Something is wrong."
"What?"
"This is not the version you signed."
I moved beside her.
The first pages looked familiar.
Then we reached paragraph seventeen.
My copy said I waived claims to specified joint accounts and the marital residence.
Gavin's filed copy said I acknowledged receiving $25 million from SwiftFreight during the marriage and accepted full responsibility for any related liabilities.
My signature appeared at the bottom.
I had never seen that paragraph.
"They replaced a page."
Naomi shook her head.
"Not exactly."
She zoomed in on the document image.
"Look at your signature."
The ink pattern was identical to the signature on the genuine final page.
Not similar.
Pixel for pixel identical.
"They copied it."
"Yes."
I felt something inside me settle.
The belt recording proved coercion.
The parking video proved the scratched car was staged.
The tax records proved money flowed through hidden entities.
Karen's email proved Gavin intentionally let Charlotte use my identity.
And now he had filed a document in court containing a duplicated signature on a page I had never signed.
Gavin had spent days trying to turn me into a criminal.
In the process, he had created a timeline of his own decisions.
Naomi closed the file.
"We are going to respond carefully."
"How carefully?"
"With the original agreement, the recording, metadata, and a request for forensic examination."
"When?"
"Tonight."
Karen's email also forced me to revisit the beginning of Charlotte's career at SwiftFreight.
I searched old holiday photographs stored in my cloud archive.
There she was.
Not prominently.
Not yet introduced as an executive.
In a photograph from the Duluth year, Charlotte stood near the edge of a company reception wearing a contractor badge.
Gavin had told me that evening she was "some communications freelancer."
In another image six months later, she sat three seats from him at a charity dinner.
I had been home with the flu.
A third photograph showed Mason pouring wine while Charlotte leaned toward Gavin.
None proved an affair.
Together, they proved something more basic.
Gavin lied when he later told me Charlotte was a new hire he barely knew.
"Why does that matter financially?" Daniel asked.
"Because if he concealed the length of their relationship, related-party payments to her may have been mischaracterized."
Daniel nodded.
"That matters."
We requested no gossip evidence.
We requested contracts, payment dates, conflict disclosures, and vendor onboarding records.
Charlotte's first consulting agreement was signed by Gavin personally.
It contained a conflict-certification box marked NONE.
Six months later, Northern Meridian began paying her additional advisory fees.
No board disclosure accompanied them.
The affair might still have been personal at first.
The money made it corporate.
Naomi saw me studying the old pictures.
"Do not torture yourself with the timeline unless it serves a purpose."
"I am not trying to find the first day he cheated."
"What are you trying to find?"
"The first day he started telling me a version of Charlotte that was useful to him."
I closed the photo archive.
The answer was earlier than I wanted.
But the emotional truth no longer changed the legal one.
Whatever Gavin and Charlotte called their relationship, money had been moving around it for years.
My phone buzzed.
It was another unknown number.
This message was different.
It contained no threat.
Just an address and a name.
Luis Ortega's widow.
And beneath it, one sentence.
May you like
She still has the photograph Gavin paid to disappear.
