Chapter 15 - The Person Still Inside
The transfer was stopped with six minutes to spare.
IT traced the login to a conference room on the seventeenth floor.
Security arrived to find the room empty.
A laptop was still warm.
Nora watched camera footage with Rourke and Leah.
At 11:21 p.m., a janitorial cart entered the elevator.
At 11:24, a woman in a gray cleaning uniform stepped off on seventeen.
She kept her face down.
Alma leaned toward the screen.
"Stop."
The video paused.
"Back up."
Rourke rewound.
Alma pointed to the woman's left hand.
A thick gold ring.
"That's Beatrice Voss."
Daniel's aunt.
Celeste's younger sister.
Nora had met Beatrice maybe eight times. She taught art history at a small college and complained constantly about corporate life.
"She hates the company," Nora said.
Alma shook her head.
"She hates being left out of it."
Beatrice had inherited no voting shares after Martin's death.
But investigators found that she had helped Celeste create shell companies for years.
The offshore transfer was meant to finance their escape and pay intermediaries.
One intermediary was the driver who attacked the boathouse.
Another had pried open Nora's wrecked trunk.
Graham had arrived first, taken the red case, and hidden before that man arrived.
The timeline finally fit.
Police found Beatrice at a ferry terminal before dawn.
She surrendered without drama.
Then she asked for coffee.
Rourke later told Nora, "She said something odd."
"Everyone in this family does."
"She said Celeste wasn't trying to buy silence. She was trying to buy time."
"For what?"
"She wouldn't say."
Nora went to see Celeste in jail.
Leah told her not to.
Alma told her absolutely not.
Nora went anyway.
Celeste sat behind thick glass, shoulder immobilized.
"You look tired," she said.
"You look incarcerated."
Celeste smiled faintly.
Nora asked, "What were you buying time for?"
Celeste's expression changed.
Not fear.
Pity.
"You still think this is about the company."
Nora's pulse slowed.
"What else is there?"
Celeste leaned closer to the glass.
May you like
"Ask Daniel why your father really died.
