Chapter 7 - CHAPTER 6: THE RAT IN THE CORNER
The afternoon sun began to sink behind the Manhattan skyline, casting long, crimson shadows across the floor of my home office.
It was 4:30 p.m. Half an hour remained before my deadline.
My phone rang. The caller ID displayed an unknown number from a local New York area code.
I picked it up. "Emily Thorne."
"Emily... please..." a woman’s voice sobbed into the phone.
It was Chloe—Daniel's sister. The woman who had been living in my parents' house while her children played on the lawn my father had meticulously cared for.
"Chloe," I said coldly. "You have twenty minutes to execute the wire transfer back to my escrow account."
"I can't, Emily!" Chloe wept hysterically. "I don't have the money! Daniel lied to you! He lied to all of us!"
I froze. "What do you mean you don't have the money?"
"The four hundred fifty thousand dollars... it’s gone!" Chloe sobbed. "Daniel didn't wire it to me to save my house! He told me to set up that Cayman account under my name three months ago because he said he was investing it in a commercial development project in Miami! But he lost it all on high-risk options trading four weeks ago!"
My blood ran cold. The money wasn't sitting in a quiet offshore bank account waiting to be returned. Daniel had gambled away the equity of my parents' house on speculative stock options and lost every single cent.
"Where is Daniel right now, Chloe?" I demanded, my tone sharp as a razor.
"He... he packed two suitcases from his office an hour ago," Chloe confessed through her tears. "He told Mom he was heading to JFK Airport to catch a flight to Dubai before five o'clock! He has a passport with a secondary visa!"
I slammed my hand onto the desk, standing up instantly.
He wasn't trying to negotiate. He was using the 5:00 p.m. deadline as a smoke screen to flee the country with whatever liquid cash he had managed to drain from his firm's payroll accounts.
"Victoria!" I shouted into my intercom, patching my lawyer into a three-way call. "Daniel is at JFK Airport right now trying to board a flight to Dubai! He liquidated the equity funds!"
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"I'm on it," Victoria said instantly. "I’m contacting the Port Authority Police and the FBI emergency magistrate right now. If he has an international flight booked under his name, we can flag his passport under an emergency federal flight-risk warrant for financial fraud!"
"I'm heading to JFK," I said, grabbing my coat and car keys. "I'm not letting him step onto that plane."
