Chapter 4 - Noon — The AuditMarcus’s office was in the nicest building in the downtown area — the one with the glass elevators and the marble floors and the sign out front that said HALE PROPERTIES: BUILDING THE FUTURE, ONE FAMILY AT A TIME.
I’d never been inside.
He’d never invited me.
Lila and I stood across the street at 11:58 a.m., watching the front doors. Daniel was with Lila’s mom — a retired schoolteacher who baked the best chocolate chip cookies on the planet and thought Daniel hung the moon — so we could focus.
“Team is in position,” Lila said, looking at her watch. “They’re going up the back stairs right now. They’ll walk through the front door of his suite at exactly noon. Badges first. Very official. Very scary.”
“Does he know they’re coming?”
“Not a clue. His assistant just texted our mole — she says Marcus is in his office pacing. Called his lawyer three times in the last hour. Keeps slamming his fist on the desk. Sarah showed up ten minutes ago with her yoga mat and her diamond earrings and her ‘supportive wife’ face on. They have no idea what’s about to hit them.”
At 12:00 on the dot, I saw them.
Three people in sharp gray suits, leather briefcases in hand, badges clipped to their belts, walking through the front doors of the building like they owned the place. They didn’t hurry. They didn’t look around. They just walked — slow, deliberate, inevitable.
I almost felt bad for Marcus.
Almost.
“Want to go get coffee?” Lila said. “This part is boring. It’ll take them twenty minutes just to get past his assistant. Then another hour of Marcus yelling and threatening and calling his lawyer and his ‘important friends’ who all suddenly won’t answer their phones. By the time he realizes they’re not leaving, he’ll be sweating through his five-hundred-dollar suit.”
We went to the little café around the corner — the same one I’d gone to every day for six months when I was first starting my business, back when I could only afford a small black coffee and a tip I could barely afford. We sat by the window and watched people walk by and waited.
My phone buzzed at 12:47 p.m.
It was an unknown number.
I answered.
“Ms. Hale?” a woman’s voice said. Professional. Crisp. “This is Agent Torres with the State Real Estate Commission. I’m currently in your brother Marcus Hale’s office conducting a routine audit of his business records. Mr. Hale has mentioned your name several times. He says you are a ‘silent partner’ in his firm and that you are responsible for the majority of his financial decisions. Is that correct?”
I smiled into my coffee cup.
There it was.
The first lie.
Marcus was already throwing me under the bus.
“Agent Torres,” I said, keeping my voice perfectly even, “I can assure you I have never been a partner — silent or otherwise — in any of Mr. Hale’s business ventures. I have never made a financial decision for his company. I have never signed a document on his behalf. I have never even been inside his office until today, and I’m currently standing across the street drinking coffee.”
There was a pause. I could hear yelling in the background. Marcus’s voice, loud and frantic: She’s lying! She controls everything! Ask her about the offshore accounts! Ask her about the—
Then the door closed, and the yelling was muffled.
“I see,” Agent Torres said. She sounded amused. “Mr. Hale is… quite insistent. He’s also claiming that all of the irregularities we’re finding in his books were done at your direction. That you ‘forced’ him to inflate property values and falsify expense reports.”
“Of course he is,” I said. “Here’s what I can tell you, Agent Torres. I own and operate Hale Strategic Consulting — an entirely separate firm. We do real estate acquisitions, financial analysis, and portfolio management for high-net-worth clients. Over the last three years, we have purchased twenty-seven properties that Mr. Hale was either the listing agent on or the ‘developer’ for. In every single case, Mr. Hale misrepresented the condition of the property, the projected income, or both. We have forensic appraisals, email chains, recorded phone calls, and bank records proving he knew the numbers were fake and lied to us anyway.”
I paused.
“Total damages?” I said. “Just over twelve million dollars. We were going to file suit next week. But since you’re already there… feel free to use anything we have. We’ve been compiling it for a while.”
Another long pause.
“Twelve million,” Agent Torres said.
“Give or take,” I said. “I’ll have my assistant send over our entire file to your office in the next hour. Every email. Every text. Every appraisal. Every recorded call. And Agent Torres?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful with Mr. Hale. He’s very good at making other people take the fall for his mistakes. But if you follow the money? It always leads back to him.”
I hung up.
Lila was staring at me, her mouth slightly open. “Twelve million? We’re at fourteen last I checked.”
“Round numbers sound more real in court,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. “Also, I didn’t want her to think we were exaggerating.”
Before she could respond, my phone blew up.
Texts. Calls. Emails.
Marcus’s lawyer. Marcus’s business partner. His biggest client. His second-biggest client. The bank that held his mortgages.
Everyone was suddenly very interested in talking to Clara Hale.
May you like
Lila looked at her own phone, which was doing the same thing. “Phase three just dropped, didn’t it?”
I nodded. “It did. And Marcus is about to learn the most expensive lesson of his life: when you point one finger at someone else, there are three pointing back at you.”
