Chapter 16 - Voices from the Grave
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Preston had been seventeen when my parents died. Old enough to fully comprehend greed, but young enough to be manipulated by a mastermind.
Julian’s father, Richard Kingsley, had served on the Whitmore advisory board back then. His Chicago shipping empire had been secretly drowning in debt even then. My father had apparently discovered irregular offshore accounts tied directly to Kingsley, and Preston—my father's own protégé—had known about the embezzlement and helped cover it up.
The final, devastating piece of evidence arrived on my desk in the form of a grainy, highly degraded security video from a rural gas station near the highway, time-stamped the night of the crash.
It was almost completely useless. Almost.
The footage showed a dark SUV—my parents' car—parked under the flickering canopy lights two hours before the crash. A young man stepped out of a trailing vehicle and walked toward the undercarriage of the Whitmore SUV. He was tall, thin, with a very specific, arrogant posture. It was unmistakable. It was Preston at seventeen.
And standing watch near the gas pumps, smoking a cigarette, was Richard Kingsley’s private driver.
I watched the footage loop on my monitor in utter silence. Arthur stood beside me, his face carved from weathered stone, his jaw locked tight.
“Preston may not have had the mechanical knowledge to cut the brake lines himself,” Arthur said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. “But he was there. He distracted the driver. He watched it happen.”
“He knew,” I whispered.
“Yes, Miss Whitmore. He knew.”
The fragment of the original Blair that still lived inside my heart seemed to shatter all over again. Not because Preston was a thief—I had already accepted that. But orchestrating the murder of the people who rescued him from an orphanage was a different breed of evil. It was a retroactive poison that reached backward through time, destroying every hug, every holiday dinner, and every fake, brotherly smile he had ever given her.
I didn't shed a single tear. I didn't have the time to cry. I had a trap to set.
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We didn't take the evidence to the local police, who could easily be bought off or stalled by expensive lawyers. We handed it quietly to federal agents who had jurisdiction over massive financial crimes, public corruption, and zero affection for wealthy psychopaths who used murder as a shortcut to inheritance.
Then, I waited for the rats to panic.
