Chapter 3 - The Family Council of PanicBy noon, the Ross family panic had escalated from localized confusion to total, systemic meltdown.
Since David, Richard, and Lorraine were all cut off from their liquidity, they had no choice but to gather at Lorraine’s country club lounge—one of the few places they still had unpaid tab credit for another two hours—to figure out how to respond to the disaster that had dropped out of the sky.
Of course, I knew this because Melanie—who had foolishly left her location sharing active on a shared family recipe app—was currently sitting at table number four, and the club’s interior security cameras were accessible via my cloud admin panel.
I sat at my executive desk in the hotel suite, projecting the security feed onto my dual monitors while I ate a light lunch.
On the screen, I watched David pacing back and forth across the plush carpet, dragging his hands through his hair, his expensive suit looking crumpled and unkempt. Lorraine was dabbing her eyes with a linen napkin, looking less like an untouchable society matriarch and more like an aging woman realizing her scam had finally caught up with her. Richard sat heavily in an armchair, staring blankly at a legal notice handed to him by a process server an hour earlier.
Melanie was sobbing loudly, complaining that her weekend shopping trip to Miami had been cancelled because her credit cards were declined at the Gucci boutique.
“She did this!” David slammed his fist onto the table, causing the crystal water glasses to rattle. “She’s a psycho! She’s been sitting on this information for months, just waiting to destroy us!”
“Your father told you not to marry a career woman,” Lorraine snapped tearfully, pointing an accusing finger at Richard. “You said she was quiet! You said she wouldn't notice a few thousand here and there!”
“How the hell was I supposed to know she was a senior forensic accountant?!” Richard yelled back, his face turning a dangerous shade of crimson. “She always looked like a mouse drinking herbal tea!”
Watching them turn on each other like starving wolves in a cage brought a profound, clinical peace to my soul. For six years, they had treated me like an outsider, an inferior employee in their domestic corporation, a quiet wallet to fund their lavish lifestyles while they mocked my career behind my back. Now, the very expertise they dismissed as a boring office job was dismantling their entire generational fraud ring piece by piece.
My burner phone buzzed. It was Victoria again.
“Eleanor, you’re going to love this,” Victoria said, her voice bubbling with suppressed laughter. “David just tried to file an emergency injunction to unfreeze his personal accounts, claiming the money was entirely his earned income. Judge Miller looked at the forensic flowcharts we submitted showing your pre-marital dividends funding his lifestyle, laughed out loud in the courtroom, and threatened David’s lawyer with sanctions for frivolous motion filing.”
“Did David look as miserable as he looks on the country club security feed?” I asked mildly.
Victoria paused. “Wait, how do you—never mind, I don't even want to know. You have eyes everywhere, don't you?”
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“A good investigator never turns off her sensors,” I smiled. “What’s our next move?”
“Depositions are scheduled for Thursday morning,” Victoria replied. “And trust me, David and his family are going to need every drop of Xanax they can find before they walk into my conference room.”
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