Chapter 10 - WHAT THE LAND WAS HIDING
Fuentes arranged somewhere safe for Elena to stay while officers examined her apartment.
For the first time, Elena looked angry instead of afraid.
“They waited twenty-two years,” she said. “They can wait a few more days for me to finish talking.”
Her receipt led investigators to the retired accountant who had once received my father’s records.
He had died years earlier.
His business files had gone into storage when his daughter closed the office.
It took two days to locate the boxes.
I spent those days at my mother’s bedside, helping her eat soup and trying not to watch the door.
When Fuentes called, she asked me to bring my lawyer.
We met in a conference room with a long table and bad coffee.
A copied report lay in front of her.
“My father finished it?” I asked.
“Almost.”
The report traced buyers’ deposits through accounts tied to Hector’s development projects. Some money had paid legitimate expenses.
Some had paid personal debts.
Some had disappeared through companies controlled by the Mendoza family.
My father had participated before he understood the full pattern.
When he did, he began keeping separate records.
“So he wasn’t innocent,” I said.
Fuentes waited.
I looked again.
His signature appeared on early payment approvals.
He had written beside one:
Authorized based on false supporting invoices. My responsibility to correct.
I read that sentence three times.
My father had not left behind proof that he was perfect.
He had left proof that he had stopped pretending.
“The parcel wasn’t purchased with the missing deposits,” my lawyer explained. “The records support the ownership your mother described.”
“Then why were they so desperate for it?”
“Because Rodrigo used his position as owner to refuse a transaction that would have covered part of the shortfall,” Fuentes said. “And he kept the documents showing why.”
The land was valuable.
The truth attached to it was worse.
Jorge’s current development depended on a story in which his company had always been the rightful party to that parcel.
My father’s files exposed the old scheme.
The forged agreement exposed a new one.
Karina hadn’t simply been sent to marry into property.
She had been sent to find what my mother had hidden.
My lawyer turned to the last page.
“There’s something else.”
A note identified the person who delivered the questionable invoices.
Not Hector.
Jorge Mendoza.
May you like
Under the name, my father had written:
He knows I kept the originals. He came to my house tonight.
