Chapter 2: The Confidential Files That Broke a 30-Year Family Business
Richard took the hard drive back to his private office at Carter Global’s downtown headquarters the next morning, and he plugged it into his secure desktop computer, his hands shaking as he waited for the files to load. He had spent the past 20 years running the company with his father, building it from a small regional real estate firm into a billion-dollar global empire, and he had never imagined that someone inside the company would want to hurt him or his father. But as he scrolled through the files on the hard drive, he found a folder labeled “Security Team Payroll” that contained emails between the head of the company’s security team, a man named Jake Miller, and a anonymous offshore bank account, transferring $500,000 each month for the past year. Richard’s stomach dropped as he opened the email thread, and he read the final message from Jake Miller, sent just three days before the gala: “The job is done. The target is dead. The rest of the family will be next if they ask too many questions.”
He called Jake Miller into his office an hour later, and he sat him down across from his desk, showing him the emails from the hard drive. Jake’s face went white, and he started crying, begging Richard to give him a second chance, saying that he had been forced to do it by someone inside the company, someone who had threatened to kill his wife and two young kids if he didn’t cooperate. “It wasn’t my idea, Mr. Carter,” Jake said, sobbing as he wiped his eyes with a paper towel, “it was your son. Your son, Ethan, he’s the one who ordered the hit on your father. He said he wanted to take over the company, that you were too old and too slow to run it properly.” Richard stared at Jake in shock, unable to believe what he was hearing. Ethan Carter was his only son, the 32-year-old heir to the Carter Global empire, who had been working in the company’s real estate division for the past five years, and who Richard had always thought was a quiet, responsible man who would one day take over the company. He had no idea that Ethan had been planning to take over the company by force, that he had been working with Jake Miller for months to plot his father’s murder.
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Richard spent the next three hours going through the rest of the files on the hard drive, finding more emails between Ethan and Jake Miller, as well as security footage from the company’s parking garage that showed Ethan meeting with the three assassins the night before the gala, handing them a stack of cash and a list of the gala’s attendees. The footage also showed Ethan leaving the parking garage in his black Tesla Model X, driving away from the building with a smirk on his face, like he had just pulled off the perfect crime. Richard felt like he was going to throw up as he watched the footage, and he called his lawyer, a former federal prosecutor named Sarah Jenkins, who told him to turn over all of the evidence to the Chicago Police Department immediately, that Ethan could be charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. “You can’t let your personal feelings get in the way of this, Richard,” Sarah said over the phone, “this is a crime, and you have to do the right thing.”
Richard spent the night tossing and turning in his bed, thinking about Ethan, his only son, the boy he had raised after his wife had died in a car accident when Ethan was only 5 years old. He had worked hard to give Ethan everything he had ever wanted, to send him to the best private schools, to pay for his Harvard MBA, to give him a high-paying job at Carter Global, and now he had found out that Ethan had tried to kill his own grandfather, and that he was planning to take over the company by force. He knew that Sarah was right, that he had to do the right thing, but he also knew that telling the police about Ethan would destroy his family, that it would ruin the reputation of Carter Global, and that it would break his heart. But as he thought about the 12 innocent people who had died in the attack, including his father, he realized that he had no choice. He picked up his phone, called the Chicago Police Department, and told them to meet him at his office with a search warrant for Ethan’s apartment and his personal files.
