Chapter 22 - FACE TO FACE
The storm hit the valley at midnight, bringing sheets of torrential rain that lashed against the windows and whipped the pine trees into a roaring frenzy.
I was sitting in my father’s armchair by the dying embers of the stone fireplace when the landline phone on the desk rang. Its sharp, mechanical ring tore through the silence of the house.
I picked up the heavy receiver. "Hello?"
"Meredith?" It was Detective Reyes. His voice sounded winded, distorted by the static of a poor cellular connection amidst the storm. "We have a critical situation."
My spine stiffened. "Is it Victoria? Did her lawyers find a loophole?"
"No," Reyes said grimly. "Victoria suffered a massive stroke during intake processing at the state penitentiary an hour ago. She’s currently in a coma at the university hospital. She’s completely unresponsive."
A strange, hollow silence settled over me. "Then what’s wrong?"
"Before she collapsed," Reyes continued, his words coming fast and tense, "she gave her legal team an emergency authorization to execute a transfer of the primary offshore foundation's master cryptographic key. We assumed it was an attempt to hide her remaining personal cash."
"And wasn't it?"
"We intercepted the server transmission twenty minutes ago," Reyes said, the sound of emergency sirens wailing faintly in the background of his call. "The recipient wasn't an offshore bank, Meredith. It was an automated trust established under an encrypted domestic protocol. A protocol registered twenty years ago."
I gripped the receiver tightly, a sudden, inexplicable sense of dread creeping into the marrow of my bones. "Whose protocol, Reyes?"
"The name attached to the recipient account... it doesn't make any sense," Reyes breathed, the static hissing violently across the line. "The state lab ran the biometric authorization signature against the national registry twice to verify it."
"Reyes, who received the master key?" I demanded, my voice rising over the howling wind outside.
"Your mother, Meredith."
The world tilted beneath my feet.
"That's impossible," I stammered, my heart slamming violently against my ribs. "My mother died in a car crash on the mountain pass when I was eight years old. Dad identified the vehicle. We buried her in the family cemetery!"
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"Meredith, listen to me," Reyes said, his voice deadly serious. "The forensic biometric signature used to accept that eighty-million-dollar cryptographic key was verified by a live digital palm print taken from an authorized terminal in this city less than forty-five minutes ago."
***