Chapter 5 - THE DEATH SCENE THAT LIED
Arthur Vance had been pronounced dead in his bedroom at 6:42 on a Thursday morning.
I had repeated that fact to police, reporters, and jurors until it sounded like a line in someone else's story.
Special Agent Ward showed me the dispatch logs.
At 2:13 that same morning, an unregistered emergency vehicle had entered the service road behind my father's property.
It left twenty minutes later.
The estate camera recorded no driver because someone had replaced the security feed with an earlier recording.
My father might have been removed from the house while he was still alive.
“Who signed the medical death certificate?” I asked.
“Dr. Victor Renn.”
“He'd been treating my father for years.”
“Dr. Renn left the country two days after your arrest.”
I remembered how confidently the doctor had told me that grief could make ordinary facts seem suspicious.
I remembered apologizing to him for asking too many questions.
Now I wanted to tear every polite word out of my mouth.
Ward told us Renn had purchased property in the Emirates through a holding company linked to Silas.
Harrison found a private email between my father and a compliance executive from the week before his death.
My father had written that he intended to tell the board everything at an emergency meeting.
The board meeting was scheduled for the day after he died.
“I've been thinking about that meeting,” I said.
“Your father canceled it,” Harrison replied.
“No, the company sent a cancellation notice from his account.”
The difference changed everything.
Ward secured court authority to examine the original company mail servers.
Within hours, her team discovered that the cancellation had been sent after my father's estimated time of death.
The access token belonged to Silas.
Yet Price's office still objected to releasing me pending appeal.
He argued that exposing a husband as corrupt did not prove his wife innocent of murder.
The judge agreed to schedule an evidentiary hearing, but not to suspend my sentence.
As officers led me away, I saw Khloe in the public gallery.
Her stomach had grown noticeably since the trial.
She looked frightened rather than victorious.
She held a baby-blue envelope with both hands.
When our eyes met, she mouthed two words.
‘Help me.’
I looked to her right.
Margaret stood beside her, smiling.
Beneath Margaret's arm was a folder stamped with my father's corporate seal.
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And attached to its cover was the original cancellation notice from the morning he died.
