Chapter 6 - The St. Albans Connection
"Get the car," I told Brendan. "We're driving to Vermont."
"Sir, it's a five-hour drive, and the weather reports indicate a heavy snowstorm moving down from the Canadian border," Brendan warned. "We can have local operative teams in Burlington check his parole address—"
"I said get the car," I interrupted, standing up from my desk and pulling my wool overcoat from the brass rack near the door. "Now."
Twenty minutes later, my dark blue armored SUV was slicing through the afternoon traffic on Interstate 93 North, heading toward the mountainous terrain of northern New England.
Brendan drove while I sat in the rear leather seat, staring out the tinted window as the red-brick suburban sprawl of Boston gave way to the dense, dark evergreen forests of New Hampshire and Vermont.
My mind was a chaotic storm of memories.
I remembered Marcus when we were boys growing up in a working-class neighborhood in South Southbridge. Marcus had been the charismatic one—the boy who could charm his way out of any trouble, who smiled easily, who painted, who cried when our mother died. I had been the cold one—the older brother who managed the household budget at fourteen, who demanded perfection, who viewed emotion as an unacceptable structural vulnerability.
When I joined Arthur Callaway’s firm, Marcus had followed me like a shadow, desperately seeking my approval. And when Arthur Callaway’s financial empire began to collapse under federal scrutiny, Marcus had been a junior clerk in the accounting department.
My fingers gripped the leather armrest until the knuckles turned white.
Did Marcus know Arthur Callaway?
Of course he knew him. Marcus had worked in the file room. He had handled the physical ledgers.
And when I took those ledgers to the United States Attorney to secure my own immunity, I had never stopped to ask whether my younger brother’s signature appeared on any of the underlying documents. I had only cared about saving myself.
"Brendan," I said, my voice echoing in the quiet cabin of the SUV. "Pull up Marcus's criminal trial records from twelve years ago."
Brendan tapped his dashboard screen, routing the encrypted files to the passenger-side display.
"What am I looking for, sir?"
"The prosecution's key witness," I said, my throat dry. "Who testified against Marcus during his fraud trial?"
Brendan scrolled through the digitized legal briefs, his sharp eyes scanning the court transcripts from 2014.
After a long minute, he stopped. He looked at the screen, then turned his head slowly to meet my eyes in the rearview mirror.
"The key witness for the state," Brendan said softly, "was an anonymous informant operating under the designation Witness B."
"And who signed the affidavit verifying Witness B's financial documentation?"
Brendan swallowed hard. "Arthur Callaway's estate executor. Filed six months after Callaway's death in prison."
The truth hit me with the force of a physical explosion.
Tessa Callaway had not come to my house four years ago to avenge her father against me.
She had come because she believed my brother Marcus had framed her father—or because her father had left evidence behind that only my brother understood.
And now, Marcus was out of prison, Tessa was gone, and the dark, buried secrets of Vance & Callaway Financial were about to be dragged into the freezing Vermont snow.
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"How much further to St. Albans?" I asked, my voice deadly quiet.
"Ninety miles, Mr. Vance," Brendan said, stepping harder on the accelerator as the first white flakes of the northern snowstorm began to hit the windshield. "And the wind is picking up."
