Kat turned the corner onto her street and breathed a sigh of relief when her house came into view. The old Victorian was sandwiched between a forties bungalow and a turn of the century Craftsman house. Even from half a block away it was obvious Jace wasn’t home. His truck still sat in the same spot it had been in when they left for Hideaway Bay. A thin slab of half-melted snow slid partway down the windshield. The absence of tire tracks in the driveway meant the Subaru hadn’t been here either. No one had come or gone since their departure.
She trudged up her front steps as the weight of her troubles burned in her stomach. Harry’s house, Jace gone, and the increasingly sinister tone of the Edgewater case was wearing on her.
Jace was right about the World Institute. Why had she dismissed it as a half-baked conspiracy theory? Retaining those WI documents to help prove Nathan’s fraud might have led down a different road, but the end result was the same.
More than anything, she regretted ever going to Hideaway Bay. Landers obviously played a role too. If only she hadn’t been so anxious to talk to him.
Kat turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. She braced herself for another break-in. Instead the front door lodged against a pile of mail and flyers and it was obvious no one had been here. She bent to pick up the mail off the fir floor and stopped, suddenly aware of the tick-tock of the kitchen clock. She had never noticed the quiet before.
The silence just reminded her of Jace. He could be hurt, or worse. What if she never saw him again? The thought washed over her like rain.
Every inch of the house had so much of Jace in it. Especially the carved woodwork and wainscoting he had spent hours restoring, now bearing the scars of fire damage. A few strands of the ruined rug were all that remained, scattered across the floorboards now warped from water damage.
Kat swallowed the lump in her throat. Arguing with Jace about his World Institute exposé seemed so pointless now.
She dropped the mail on the bird’s eye maple side table and headed down the hall for the kitchen. Worrying wouldn’t help. She needed to do something. But what? Reporting Jace missing hadn’t spurred the RCMP into action, and she couldn’t afford to wait.
The kitchen was also undisturbed. No one had been here, including Jace. The same dishes sat in the sink, and the newspaper still opened to where Jace had left it. The Sentinel. Now the newspaper stirred feelings of anger rather than indifference.
Her sense of urgency returned when she remembered her missing laptop. If Nathan and Victoria hadn’t dissected its contents yet, they would soon. She’d better change her passwords and retrieve her data from her remote data storage before Nathan or Victoria figured that out. No doubt they’d destroy all her files.
Kat bounded upstairs to the study and powered on the desktop computer. While she waited, she called Marcus, the building super, and left a message about her broken office door.
Finally the computer booted up and she logged in. She breathed a sigh of relief and quickly changed her password. She clicked on her Edgewater file, noting the last access date was early yesterday evening, before she went to bed. Her files were untouched and safe, at least for now. She selected all of her laptop files and copied them onto the desktop computer, as well as to her portable hard drive.
As she waited for the files to copy, she realized she needed a computer at the office, since both hers and Harry’s were gone. She grabbed Jace’s laptop from the desk along with the portable hard drive and shoved both in her bag. Now she could finish and pull off the Edgewater report for Zachary. She checked her watch. Exactly forty minutes until her meeting with Zachary.
Thirty minutes later Kat was back at her office. The door was still broken, so she jotted a note for Marcus, hoping he’d just go ahead and fix it. She really didn’t feel like speaking to him in person right now. She returned Harry’s key to his desk drawer.
In a flash she realized what else was missing. Harry had kept a key behind his kitchen calendar. It was the key to the metal strongbox in Harry’s second drawer. Both the key and the box were gone. Harry was too thrifty to pay the bank fees for a safety deposit box, preferring to keep important documents in the metal strong box. The box contained his passport, will, and legal documents. It also contained his house deed.
Harry’s second drawer had been open when they reviewed his checkbook. She was certain the box had been inside.
Kat’s stomach dropped at the realization.
Harry could only retrieve the box if someone brought him to the office. That meant Hillary had been here with him.
Then there were the realtor’s comments—that the house belonged to Hillary, not Harry. A growing sense of dread enveloped her. She’d better talk to a lawyer. Harry needed protection.
Kat booted up Jace’s laptop and called Harry’s cell phone while she waited. It went straight to voicemail. Either powered off or a dead battery. Kat’s sense of unease grew. It had been close to twenty-four hours since Harry and Hillary had left the resort. Too long. Hillary would tire of Harry within hours. Where were they?
Kat copied her Edgewater files from the portable hard drive onto the laptop. That’s when she saw it. Buried in her Edgewater investigation files was a document that wasn’t hers.
Her heart skipped a beat as she studied the file. The file was updated last night, after midnight. That was after she went to bed, after Jace went next door. She held her breath and clicked it open.
It was Jace’s real estate story, the one that was pulled from the Sentinel just before press time:
Global Financial Implicated in Real Estate Fraud
Global Financial, a holding company, used fraudulent real estate appraisals that overstated the value of dozens of downtown Vancouver commercial properties. The holding company purchased properties, which were then flipped several times to numerous straw buyers at ever-increasing prices. As the buyers were all related, these prices were artificially inflated.
Once the property values had been substantially inflated, the accused obtained large mortgages against the properties and then subsequently defaulted on the mortgage payments. The extent of the fraud is still being determined, but is estimated at more than four hundred million dollars. No one at Global Financial could be reached for comment. The company’s address of record is 422 Cedar Street, but a complex web of holding companies makes it difficult to trace the ultimate ownership.
Kat almost fell off her chair. 422 Cedar Street was the address of the vacant lot she had visited earlier. The same address Nathan Barron used for Edgewater’s auditors, and where Fredrick Svensson’s payments were sent. That connected Jace’s real estate fraud to Edgewater and Research Analytics, which was directly connected to the World Institute. No wonder Jace’s story was crushed.
Had Jace made the connection too? Unlike her, he hadn’t visited the vacant lot. She doubted he would have paid attention to the address, knowing she had already checked it out.
She shivered. World Institute membership wasn’t the only thing Gordon Pinslett and Nathan had in common.
It might explain why Jace was specifically targeted. There was just one problem. The only people who knew Jace was at the resort were Roger Landers, Hillary, and Harry. Hillary was too self-absorbed to worry about, and Harry wasn’t an issue.
That left Roger Landers. In just two days, Jace had emerged as new competition on the story Landers had been writing about for years. At least that’s how it probably appeared in Landers’s eyes.
Knowing Jace, he likely asked Landers, a fellow journalist, for feedback on his mortgage-fraud story once he uncovered the Beecham connection. Had Landers betrayed Jace? Why hadn’t Jace come to her?
Kat shivered and drew a sweater around her shoulders. It sounded farfetched, but was it?
Then there was the issue of Fredrick Svensson, formerly a World Institute member, also tied to the same address. Someone had silenced Svensson. Would Jace be silenced too?