Chapter 5 - The Paper Trail of a Ghost
Finding a person who wishes to remain hidden in the modern world is theoretically impossible, provided they interact with the grid.
But Tessa Callaway had spent four years practicing total invisibility.
By three o'clock that afternoon, Brendan sat across from me in my study, a laptop open on his knees, surrounded by three of his top private intelligence operatives.
"She has no active bank accounts under her legal name, Mr. Vance," Brendan reported, tapping a pencil against his screen. "The salary you paid her—forty-two thousand a year—was deposited into an escrow account held by a corporate entity called Aegis Management Group in Wilmington, Delaware. Every month, thirty-five hundred dollars entered that account, and within ten minutes, thirty-two hundred dollars was wired out to a non-profit foundation based in Charlestown called The St. Jude Children’s Shelter."
I blinked. "She didn't keep her salary?"
"She kept three hundred dollars a month in cash," Brendan said, pulling up a secondary spreadsheet. "Just enough to cover her personal hygiene items, her bus passes, and the lavender plant fertilizer. She lived on three hundred dollars a month while managing an eighteen-room estate."
A cold weight settled in my stomach. She hadn't taken my money. In four years, she had refused to eat from the bread of the man who had destroyed her father. She had taken only what was strictly necessary to maintain her physical presence under my roof, donating the rest to a shelter for abandoned children.
"What about the letter Mrs. Dorothy mentioned?" I asked. "The one that arrived last Thursday?"
Brendan gestured to one of his analysts, a younger woman with short black hair who opened a forensic digital report.
"We ran a recovery sweep on the optical scanners at the local Boston Postal Sorting Facility," she said, angling her tablet toward me. "We cross-referenced every piece of mail delivered to Louisburg Square on Thursday morning. Seventeen items were junk mail, four were corporate statements for you, and one was a plain, unmarked white envelope addressed to Miss T. Callaway."
"Did you get an image of the postmark?"
"Yes, sir. It was mailed from the Central Vermont Correctional Facility in St. Albans."
I sat up straight, my pulse accelerating. "Vermont? Who is in a state prison in Vermont?"
"A man named Marcus Vance," Brendan said quietly.
The air in the room seemed to freeze entirely.
Marcus.
My younger brother.
I had not spoken my brother's name in twelve years.
Marcus was three years younger than me—a brilliant, volatile, deeply unstable man who had entered the investment world in my wake, only to spiral into narcotics addiction, grand fraud, and eventually a violent assault conviction that had landed him an eight-year sentence in a medium-security facility.
When Marcus was arrested twelve years ago, he had begged me for bail money, for top defense attorneys, for a brother's mercy.
I had refused him.
I had cut him out of my life with the same ruthless, surgical precision I applied to failing assets. I had told him that he was a liability to the Vance name, that his actions were his own responsibility, and that I would not spend a single dollar to shield him from the consequences of his own moral bankruptcy.
"Marcus," I whispered, the name feeling like gravel in my mouth. "Why would Marcus write a letter to Tessa Callaway?"
"We don't know yet, sir," Brendan said. "But the prison log shows that Marcus Vance was released on mandatory parole six days ago—last Wednesday morning."
The pieces of a terrifying, complex machinery began to lock into place inside my mind.
Marcus had been released on Wednesday. Tessa had received his letter on Thursday. She had resigned on Friday morning and vanished without a trace.
May you like
She hadn't fled from me.
She was running toward my brother.
