Chapter 6 - Uncovering The Fraud Scheme
I stood up from the leather armchair, walking over to the mahogany desk to examine the entries recorded in the dark green journal.
As a woman who had spent five years working as a certified medical billing specialist before taking the maid job, I knew how to read books.
My father had been a forensic accountant for the state of Ohio, teaching me how to spot altered numbers before I was eighteen years old.
I flipped through the yellowed pages of Arthur Sterling’s private journal, my eyes scanning past columns of handwritten numbers and dates.
Arthur hadn't just separated Mark and me to protect his high-society reputation in Connecticut; he had executed a massive corporate theft.
He had used my forged signature on those 2021 settlement papers to open a secondary offshore account in the Cayman Islands.
Over sixty months, thirty-five million dollars of Sterling Maritime’s operational profits had been funneled through that forged account.
And the primary beneficiary listed on those offshore wire documents wasn't Arthur Sterling—it was Victoria’s father, Senator Richard Vance.
Victoria hadn't just entered Mark’s life as a opportunistic socialite after his father’s death; she was the daughter of the man who had engineered our separation.
The entire Vance family had been draining the Sterling empire for five years, using Victoria to secure the final legal claim to the trust.
I looked at Mark, holding the journal page under the desk lamp so he could see the bold black ink signature at the bottom of the page.
May you like
“Look at the witness signature on your father’s 2021 trust amendment, Mark,” I said, my voice dropping into an icy register.
Mark leaned over the desk, his breath hitching sharply as he read the name printed in crisp cursive ink: RICHARD VANCE.
