Chapter 9: What the Phone Held
Grace's investigator was a compact, quiet man named Theo who arrived in eighteen minutes and spent the first five of them simply looking at the phone without touching it.
"Still syncing?" he asked.
"It stopped about ten minutes ago," I said.
He nodded.
He put on gloves, connected a small device to the phone's charging port, and waited.
The device blinked three times and went solid green.
"Mirrored," he said.
"Whatever's on here is now on our server." He looked at me.
"Grace says you can be in the room when we go through it, or you can wait."
"I'll be in the room."
It took forty minutes.
Theo worked through the phone's contents methodically — messages, files, photographs, the backup app's stored data — and said almost nothing except to occasionally read a file name aloud and note it on a pad.
Then he stopped.
"Ms.
Sterling." He turned the phone toward me.
It was a folder labeled simply *AG*.
Inside were forty-seven files.
Spreadsheets, scanned documents, and eleven audio recordings.
The first recording was dated three years ago.
I recognized Warren's voice immediately.
The other voice took me a moment.
Gerald Ashworth.
I had never heard him speak before, but the name appeared twice in the first thirty seconds.
He was giving instructions.
Specific ones.
Account numbers.
Transfer schedules.
And one sentence, delivered in the tone of a man reminding someone of something already agreed upon: *If the Sterling woman becomes a problem, Warren knows what to do.*
I sat back.
"He was planning for me specifically," I said.
"Looks that way." Theo was already writing.
"These recordings — if they're authenticated — are significantly more than what you had this morning."
"Daniel kept all of this."
"For three years.
Filed and dated." Theo looked at the folder.
"Either he's very careful or he was very afraid."
I thought about Daniel's voice on the phone at the airport.
*I kept them because I wasn't stupid enough to be the only person without insurance.*
Not loyalty.
Not guilt.
Insurance.
Grace called while Theo was still working.
"Daniel just walked into my office," she said.
"He's with his attorney.
He's asking about a cooperation agreement."
"Tell him we have the phone."
A pause.
I heard, faintly, Grace relaying the information.
Then a longer pause.
"His attorney is asking for a fifteen-minute recess," Grace said.
"He can have ten."
I ended the call and looked at Theo.
"How long to authenticate the recordings?"
"For preliminary use?
I can have something to the federal team by end of day."
"Do it."
He nodded and kept working.
I stood at the window.
The afternoon light had shifted — lower now, coming in at an angle that made the city look briefly golden before it faded.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Marcus: *SEC confirmed.
Ashworth's legal team filed an injunction this morning to block the investigation.
Judge denied it within the hour.
First time in nine years he's been denied.*
I read it twice.
Then I typed back: *My mother would have liked to know that.*
Marcus replied with a single word: *Yes.*
I put the phone in my pocket.
Theo looked up from the desk.
"Ms.
Sterling.
There's one more thing in this folder." He turned the phone toward me again.
It was a photograph.
Recent — the timestamp showed four days ago.
Daniel and Warren, seated at a restaurant table.
Between them, a document.
At the bottom of the document, two signatures.
One was Warren's.
The other was mine.
My name, in my handwriting, on a document I had never seen before.
"What is that document?" I asked.
Theo enlarged it carefully.
He read for a moment.
"It's a letter of authorization," he said slowly.
"Addressed to the Luxembourg holding firm.
It authorizes the transfer of thirty percent of Sterling Global's voting stock." He looked at me.
"Signed four days ago.
Dated as if it was signed six months ago."
Thirty percent.
Added to what Daniel had already taken from the safe, added to what Warren controlled through the board proxies he had accumulated over years — it would have been enough.
"They were going to take the company," I said.
"Yes," Theo said.
"And make it look like you authorized it."
I looked at the photograph.
Daniel and Warren at their restaurant table, the document between them, both of them looking at the camera with the easy confidence of men who believed they had already won.
Four days ago, they had believed that.
I picked up my phone and called Grace.
May you like
"Tell Daniel's attorney the ten minutes are up," I said.
"And tell them we have the photograph."
