Chapter 7 - The Foundation Ledgers
The rain had settled into a steady, gray drizzle by late afternoon. Dale sat three minutes later than our agreed time, sliding into the booth opposite me. He reached into his briefcase and slid a thick manila envelope across the Formica table.
"You shouldn't have called me on my cell, Marcus," Dale said. "Richard's people audit our terminal logs every quarter."
"You're the one who reached out, Dale," I said. "You said you had ledger entries that proved Richard wasn't just hiding assets from a messy divorce. Let's see them."
I pulled out a sheaf of photocopied bank statements bearing the official letterhead of Richard's public charity foundation. "Look at the November entries," Dale whispered. "Three hundred thousand dollars moved out of the endowment fund into a shell account registered under a dummy LLC. From there, it was broken down into five-figure wire transfers routed straight to Pine Ridge Psychiatric Services."
I stared at the paper. The amount matched the timeline of Elena's sudden, unexplained disappearance from the family home over a year ago. Richard had told everyone she had suffered a severe nervous breakdown and voluntarily checked herself into a secluded private facility. But these ledgers painted an entirely different picture. It wasn't a voluntary stay. It was a financially engineered disappearance, funded by embezzled charity grants.
"He used foundation capital to pay for her confinement and silence the attending staff," I said. "He didn't just lock Lily in that basement because she was acting out. He treats people like property to be managed and hidden when they stop serving his public image."
"There's more," Dale said. "That clinic isn't licensed for standard psychiatric rehabilitation. It's a private, locked-ward facility that caters to high-net-worth individuals who want family members erased without a paper trail through public courts."
I folded the documents carefully and slid them back into the manila envelope. "Where are you going?" Dale asked.
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"To see Sarah Vance," I said. "She's handling the emergency custody filings. With these ledgers and the bank routing numbers, Richard's financial firewall just cracked wide open."
