Chapter 13 - THE SIGNATURE I NEVER MADE
The forged signature looked perfect.
It reproduced the unusual loop I made at the bottom of the E in Evelyn.
It even included the slight upward break that appeared when I signed quickly.
But my father had taught me one thing about corporate signatures.
A copy could imitate handwriting, not intent.
The letter purported to authorize payment from a charitable fund to a numbered account hours before Arthur died.
I had never approved it.
Harrison obtained the bank's authentication records.
The transfer had required both a biometric check and a hardware token.
My token had been missing after Silas renovated our home office.
The biometric check came from a device assigned to Vance Holdings.
A security engineer discovered that its sensor had been replaced shortly before the transaction.
There was no legitimate chain of custody for the replacement.
The evidence supported fraud, but Price refused to acknowledge that it also undermined the murder case.
“The jury convicted on multiple pieces of evidence,” he said publicly.
I wanted to ask him how many pieces had to be forged before justice admitted the picture was false.
Ward made a discovery in the letter's fibers.
They matched a batch of specialty paper my father had purchased for confidential board correspondence.
The watermark placed its manufacture years after Clara allegedly vanished.
Someone had written at least part of the letter later than the police believed.
Then Ward's laboratory identified two different inks.
The warning to Arthur was old.
The signature and account instruction were new.
The box had been opened and resealed before it was buried, or during a later excavation.
The first possibility implicated someone with access to Clara.
The second suggested that evidence handlers had been compromised.
We did not know which was worse.
Harrison asked for a complete audit of the original crime scene.
The judge ordered it over Price's objection.
By midnight, three evidence technicians had been placed on administrative leave.
One tried to cross into Canada.
His car contained cash, passports, and a key to a storage locker.
Inside the locker were sealed copies of every photograph used to convict me.
Some images showed their source files had been edited.
One showed my father standing beside Dr. Renn on the morning he supposedly died.
He was alive.
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And behind him stood Nolan Price.
