Chapter 3 - WHAT LEO RECORDED
Leo remembered recording only one conversation.
He had not been spying.
That distinction mattered to me.
Three days earlier, he had been sitting beneath the staircase using his tablet to record sound effects for a school project.
Footsteps.
Doors.
Rain against glass.
Then Elena entered my study with a man Leo knew only as “Mr. Marcus.”
Marcus Dane.
Chief financial officer of Vance Holdings.
A man I had trusted for nine years.
Leo heard Elena say his name.
So he left the recorder running.
“What did they talk about?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Numbers.”
“What numbers?”
“I don’t know.”
Then he remembered one sentence.
“Aunt Elena said, ‘If David sees the original ledger, he’ll know.’”
My skin went cold.
“What ledger?”
Leo shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Did Marcus say anything?”
“He said I was upstairs.”
“What?”
Leo frowned, concentrating.
“He said, ‘The boy’s upstairs.’ Then Aunt Elena said, ‘He’s always where he shouldn’t be.’”
I looked toward the hospital-room door.
Until that moment, the family and financial sides of my life had still occupied separate rooms in my head.
Now they collided.
Vance Holdings managed commercial real estate and private investment assets inherited from my father.
Elena held a minority family interest.
I served as chief executive.
Marcus controlled financial reporting beneath the board’s audit committee.
If Elena and Marcus were discussing an original ledger inside my study, Leo’s disappearance might not have begun with family anger.
It might have begun with money.
Police asked Leo where the tablet was.
He looked at me.
“I hid it.”
Elena had apparently entered his bedroom after dinner and asked for it.
Leo noticed she was acting strange.
He told her he had left it at school.
Then she told him I had fallen in the pantry.
He followed her downstairs.
The juice came next.
“Where did you hide the tablet?” I asked.
His brow furrowed.
“I moved it.”
“Where?”
“I don’t want to say.”
I almost told him I was his father and needed to know.
The old instinct.
Control first.
Then I saw his bruised wrist.
He had spent a night beneath my floor because an adult wanted something he possessed.
I changed my question.
“Do you feel safe telling me?”
He hesitated.
“Not yet.”
It hurt.
But I nodded.
“Okay.”
That was when Detective Carla Ruiz, the investigator assigned to Leo’s disappearance, entered.
She had already spoken with Elena.
“Elena says she never gave Leo juice.”
I looked at Leo.
He looked at me.
“She also says she had no idea the crawlspace existed.”
I almost laughed.
“She tried to stop me breaking the floor.”
Ruiz nodded.
“We have that statement from you. We’re also checking renovation records.”
Then she gave me the first real complication.
The pantry panel had Elena’s fingerprints on it.
But it had mine too.
I stared at her.
“I didn’t know it existed.”
“That may be true.”
“How are mine there?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Elena had denied knowledge.
Physical evidence now touched both of us.
May you like
And somewhere outside that hospital room, Leo’s tablet remained hidden.
📖 Leo confirmed he recorded Elena and my CFO discussing a secret ledger, but fingerprints on the hidden door suddenly gave my sister a way to turn suspicion toward me. 👇
