Chapter 7 - Turning the Tables
The discovery of Chloe Morris changed the entire battlefield.
Within two hours, our private investigator tracked Chloe down to a modest brownstone in Hoboken, New Jersey. Accompanied by Robert Hastings, I arrived at her doorstep just as she was carrying groceries up the stairs.
When Robert presented his credentials and laid out the criminal exposure regarding wire fraud conspiracy, Chloe broke down on her front steps. She wasn't an accomplice enjoying stolen wealth; she was another casualty of Aaron’s predatory playbook.
"Aaron promised to take me with him when he relocated to Miami," Chloe sobbed, sitting at her kitchen table while clutching a mug of tea. "He told me he was going to take over your company, Daniel. He said you were a weak executive who didn't know how to scale. He forced me to draft the dummy invoices using templates from my previous employer, and then he fired me without a severance package so I wouldn't be anywhere near his office when the audit hit."
"Did he give you anything in writing, Chloe?" Robert asked gently. "Any emails? Any agreements?"
Chloe stood up, walked over to her bedroom, and emerged with a thumb drive attached to an external hard drive.
"I kept everything," she said, sliding the drive across the table. "He made me sign non-disclosure agreements, but I knew he was setting me up as the fall guy if the IRS flagged the offshore wires. On this drive, you’ll find his personal voice memos dictating the exact wording for the fraudulent invoices, along with bank routing numbers for his private accounts in Nassau. He already transferred half the stolen $214,000 into a high-yield speculative crypto fund."
I picked up the hard drive. It weighed almost nothing in my palm, but it carried the weight of a ten-ton sledgehammer.
"Thank you, Chloe," I said. "Robert will arrange for full immunity cooperation with the county prosecutor."
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As we drove back across the George Washington Bridge, the Manhattan skyline glittered against the black river. For the first time in forty-eight hours, the suffocating knot in my chest unraveled. Aaron had spent seven months carefully constructing an elaborate gallows to hang my company and my marriage.
He had no idea that the noose was about to slip around his own neck.
