Chapter 2 - The Audit Begins
The next morning, I arrived at Halden Federal Bank before the sun was fully up. As the chief forensic accountant, I held the digital keys to financial kingdoms that ordinary citizens didn't even know existed.
I locked myself in my office, closed the blinds, and pulled up the dormant files of Mercer Construction. For five years, I hadn't looked at them because the pain was too sharp. Now, looking through the lens of a federal investigator, the patterns screamed at me.
"You left a trail, Daniel," I muttered, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard.
When a man fakes his death, he needs capital. He can’t use his social security number, which meant Daniel needed a ghost. I traced the $1.2 million life insurance payout that had gone into Mercer Construction. Within three weeks of hitting the company account five years ago, $900,000 of it had been paid out to a shell company called Nautilus Consulting LLC, registered in Delaware.
The registered agent for Nautilus? Evelyn Mercer.
From Nautilus, the money was wired in monthly increments of $15,000 to a private offshore account in the Cayman Islands, before routing back into a regional bank account in Boston under the name David Miller.
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I pulled up the corporate registry for the private maternity residence I had visited yesterday. One of the primary silent investors of that luxury facility was none other than David Miller.
I leaned back in my leather chair, a cold satisfaction settling into my bones. He hadn't just faked his death; he had used his own mother to launder the insurance money back to him so he could live like a king while I paid off his old debts.
