CHAPTER 7: Daniel Reed’s Last Audit

Daniel had discovered the missing money six months before he vanished.
It was not one theft. It was a system.
Dormant accounts had been drained through false closures. Elderly clients had been moved into products they never approved. Cash shipments had been altered, then corrected on paper by people with access high enough to leave no fingerprints.
The black duffel had come from one of those shipments.
Daniel had intercepted it before it disappeared into the chain of lies.
He could have gone straight to the police, but he knew someone inside the bank was feeding information to the people stealing from it.
So he hid the cash where no executive could quietly delete it.
With his own son.
That fact made Ms. Carter angry before it made sense.
Then she remembered Daniel’s life insurance was frozen, his accounts flagged, his name stained by rumors of embezzlement.
He had not used Noah because he was careless.
He had used the only person the bank had not thought to watch.
And that made the truth even worse.
The note ended with one instruction written in Daniel’s careful hand: Alicia will know what to do if she is still herself.
Ms. Carter folded the paper once, slowly.
She had spent three months surviving inside a machine that wanted her obedient. That sentence felt like a hand reaching out of the dark to ask whether she still had a spine.