Chapter 15 - Ghosts on the Highway
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My parents’ fatal car crash had always been described by the authorities and the media with one specific word: Tragic.
Not suspicious. Not criminal. Just a horrible, tragic accident.
It had happened on a slick, rainy stretch of highway outside Santa Barbara. The official police report cited catastrophic brake failure. The car tore through a guardrail and plummeted down a ravine, catching fire before emergency crews could arrive. Blair had been seventeen years old, left shattered and alone. Preston, the brave older brother, had gone to the morgue to identify the bodies. Julian’s father had delivered a weeping eulogy at the funeral. Martha had held Blair as she shook, and Carter and Jackson had stood by the casket in sharp black suits, swearing an oath to protect her forever.
Now, Phoebe’s venomous words dug into the very foundation of my reality.
Your parents’ accident wasn’t what you think.
By midnight, I had unleashed hell. Arthur awakened the old, shadow network my father had used when polite corporate lawyers weren’t ruthless enough. We hired retired private investigators, former federal agents, a seasoned mechanic who testified as an expert witness in corporate sabotage cases, and a brilliant data recovery specialist in Seattle who was paid a fortune to resurrect ghosts from ruined hard drives.
We found the first crack in the official story within forty-eight hours.
The police report listed the brake failure as the result of "long-term mechanical wear and neglect." But my father was notoriously paranoid about safety; his vehicles were obsessively maintained by a private, heavily vetted garage. Yet, the maintenance files for that specific month were missing from the Whitmore physical archives. They hadn't been accidentally thrown away. They had been deliberately removed.
Arthur’s team found the carbon copies in a locked storage unit downtown—a unit Martha had desperately tried to access just three days before her arrest.
The documents proved the brakes on that exact SUV had been entirely replaced with brand-new parts just one week before the fatal crash.
The second crack came from a corrupted audio file. The Seattle specialist managed to recover a deleted voicemail from my mother’s cloud backup, sent to my father’s private line a day before they died.
Her voice played through the speakers in my office, sounding warm, but tight with anxiety.
May you like
“Edward,” she said. “Please don’t confront Preston about the accounts yet. He’s still just a child in some ways, and I know Julian’s father is pushing him to do this. Just wait until we’re back from Santa Barbara. We’ll handle Richard Kingsley and the missing money together.”
I listened to the recording three times in a row, my blood turning to ice.
