Chapter 6 - The Trail of Dirty Money
While Diego sat in the downtown detention facility awaiting his preliminary hearing, Nathan and his team of forensic accountants began peeling back the layers of the Vance family finances.
What they uncovered wasn't just corporate debt; it was systematic, deliberate fraud.
On Thursday morning, Nathan called me into his law office on the fortieth floor of the Wells Fargo Center.
Spread out across his massive glass desk were bank statements, offshore wire transfer records, and corporate tax returns spanning five years.
"Look at this, Val," Nathan said, pointing to a series of transactions highlighted in yellow marker.
I leaned over the desk. "What am I looking at?"
"For the past three years, Diego wasn't just managing the digital marketing for his father’s dealerships," Nathan explained. "He was running a phantom vendor scheme. He created four fake advertising agencies registered in Delaware. He was billing his father’s company eighty thousand dollars a month for 'digital media services' that were never performed."
My eyes widened in disbelief. "He was stealing from his own father?"
"To the tune of two point four million dollars," Nathan confirmed. "And where do you think that money went?"
"The crypto operation?" I guessed.
"Part of it," Nathan nodded. "The rest went into high-stakes sports gambling in Las Vegas and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. But three months ago, Arthur hired an independent auditor to review the company’s accounts because the dealerships were losing money."
The final piece of the puzzle slammed into place.
"Diego was about to get caught by his own father," I breathed, my skin prickling with cold realization. "He needed two million dollars fast to cover the hole in the books before the audit was finalized."
"Exactly," Nathan said, slamming his hand onto the desk. "He couldn't get a bank loan because his personal credit was destroyed. So he targeted your Capitol Hill condo, which is worth two point eight million dollars completely paid off. His plan was to force you to sign over the property, take out a hard-money equity loan on it, dump the cash into the company bank account to cover his theft, and leave you holding the mortgage debt."
I slumped into a chair, rubbing my temples. The sheer level of sociopathic calculation was staggering.
"He didn't just throw a plate at me because he was angry," I said softly. "He threw it because his entire life was collapsing, and I was the only thing standing between him and a federal prison sentence."
"Well," Nathan said, pulling a fresh set of documents from his folder. "Now he has both."
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"What do you mean?"
"The District Attorney just upgraded the charges," Nathan revealed with a sharp, lethal smile. "It’s no longer just domestic battery. They're charging him with First-Degree Attempted Extortion, Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon, and Grand Larceny."
