Chapter 6 - THE DEAD MAN'S ACCOUNT
Cassandra Voss did not disappear.
That would have been easier to understand.
Instead, she went on television beside my mother and declared that I had been harassing a grieving widow.
I watched her press a tissue to dry eyes while my mother kept one reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“Savannah has always been imaginative,” Beatrice said.
“She creates painful stories when she feels excluded.”
I shut off the screen before I threw the remote.
Rebecca watched me carefully.
“You can be furious without giving them what they want.”
“What do they want?”
“To provoke you into acting in a way they can use against you.”
I knew she was right.
I also knew I was tired of being the only person in the family expected to exercise restraint.
Detective Miller had begun interviewing everyone who had seen the company SUV on the night of my assault.
A maintenance worker remembered a woman crying in the parking garage stairwell.
He couldn't identify her.
But he remembered a blue scarf.
My mother owned dozens of scarves.
One was navy blue, with a thin silver edge.
She had worn it in a photograph taken at the foundation gala earlier that evening.
Miller requested surveillance footage from nearby buildings and asked the foundation for attendee records.
She also found the unidentified larger man from the first recording.
His name was Owen Pike.
He was a contract security consultant employed by Croft Capital.
He denied touching me.
He claimed he had gone to the garage to retrieve supplies.
The camera plainly contradicted part of his statement.
Miller warned him that lying would only deepen his problems.
He asked for a lawyer.
Meanwhile, Elaine traced one of the $27 million's branches to an account opened in Stephen Voss's name almost a year after his death.
The account had received payments totaling $730,000.
Someone had authenticated those transactions using copies of documents from his estate.
The account was closed after I first requested the trust records.
“Who got the money?” I asked.
“Cash withdrawals, international transfers, and one final payment to Bellweather Arts,” Elaine replied.
It was the kind of transaction trail designed to make every answer produce another question.
But at the very end stood an unusually precise invoice.
The invoice named a storage facility in Duluth and referenced Archive 17.
Rebecca got a preservation request underway.
Investigators obtained legal authority to retrieve the records and examine the contents of the rented unit.
They found six filing cabinets, a sealed computer, boxes of old correspondence, and a wall of labeled banker boxes.
No cash.
No jewelry.
Only paper.
My father's greatest enemy had apparently been somebody's recordkeeping.
One folder held Stephen's original complaint, together with research he had conducted before his death.
Another contained photographs of shell-company executives attending private gatherings at my parents' lake house.
And one contained letters addressed to me.
The first began with a sentence that made me feel as if my grandfather had reached out of the past.
Dear Savannah, if you are reading this, the adults around you have failed to tell you the truth.
The signature at the bottom wasn't my grandfather's.
It belonged to Stephen Voss.
He wrote that he had discovered unauthorized financial transfers and had tried to warn my mother.
According to the letter, she knew more about the scheme than my father admitted.
He also warned that multiple investors had been persuaded to sign releases through misleading statements.
I read until my vision blurred.
Stephen had believed that the trust was only one piece of a larger web.
At the end of the last letter, he mentioned a private ledger kept outside all the business systems.
He called it the Red Book.
Then he added one line.
May you like
If I disappear, find the woman they buried without a body.
