Chapter 9 - The Notary’s Last Stamp)
Celia asked for paper.
In a secure room at the district station, she drew the Kestrel accounting building from memory. The closing room occupied the ground floor. Victor’s private office overlooked it from a mezzanine. The server room and records archive were above, behind the three circular windows. A freight elevator connected all levels, but its control panel required Victor’s fingerprint.
“There’s a second stair,” Celia said, marking a narrow line at the rear. “Gregory doesn’t know about it. Victor used it when inspectors visited. It opens behind a panel in the archive.”
“How do you know?” Vega asked.
“Thomas showed me.”
Alison looked up. “My father was inside the brewery?”
“Many times. He spent years collecting evidence against Victor. He thought the city would stop Harbor Line if he proved the property acquisitions were fraudulent.”
“Why didn’t he give the evidence to police?”
Celia rubbed the bruise on her wrist. “He tried. Files disappeared. Witnesses changed their statements. Victor always knew which investigator had been assigned before Thomas did.”
Vega’s expression gave nothing away, but she quietly moved the planning team to another room and limited radio details to officers she selected personally.
Celia removed her notary stamp from a cloth bag. The metal base was scratched and dull from years of use.
“Victor made me stamp blank pages,” she said. “He kept them in his office and printed whatever he needed above the seal. Thomas wanted me to mark the fraudulent ones so they could be identified later.”
She turned the stamp over. A needle had been fixed beside one corner of the seal plate. It produced a tiny puncture whenever the stamp struck paper.
“Every false document has a pinhole three millimeters below the lower border,” she explained. “The original agreements, the liens, Alison’s power of attorney. All of them.”
Naomi had argued in court that patterns could expose fraud, but she had never imagined evidence this simple. If Celia testified and experts matched the pinhole marks, prosecutors could connect years of forged instruments to a single source.
“Why didn’t you tell Thomas?” Alison asked.
“I did. The night before he died.”
Thomas Reed’s death had been attributed to a heart attack. He was seventy-one, with a history of high blood pressure. Alison had never questioned the doctor’s conclusion.
Celia’s eyes filled. “He said he would take everything to a federal investigator in Chicago the next morning. He never arrived.”
“Are you saying Victor killed my father?”
“I’m saying Victor knew about the meeting, and I’m saying I have lived with that knowledge for three years.”
The room fell silent.
Vega brought them back to the immediate problem. They needed Victor to present or discuss the forged originals while a recording device captured him. They needed the hostages located. Most of all, they needed Abigail and Naomi out alive.
Alison would wear a transmitter disguised as the clasp on her handbag. A second device would be sewn into the hem of her green dress. The cloned flash drive would contain harmless copies of selected files and a hidden beacon. Officers would remain close enough to enter when she spoke a distress phrase.
“What phrase?” Alison asked.
“Something natural that you will remember under pressure.”
She thought of Darnell’s words and chose, “This is the wrong stop.”
Celia volunteered to go with her.
“Absolutely not,” Vega said.
“Victor expects a notary. Gregory said the bank lawyer demanded an in-person signature. If Alison arrives alone, they will bring someone else, someone loyal to them. I can delay the closing, challenge the identification, and create a record.”
“You are also a witness they may want silenced.”
“Which is why they will let me get close.”
Alison understood the fear in Celia’s face because it was the same fear she had seen in Abigail on the bus: not weakness, but knowledge of what waited at the next stop.
“She should decide,” Alison said.
Vega reluctantly agreed. Celia recorded a full statement first. She demonstrated the altered stamp on video, identified every participant she knew, and named the officers who had warned Victor about earlier complaints. Copies were transmitted to state and federal prosecutors outside Milwaukee.
By seven, rain covered the city. Gregory sent directions to a loading entrance on the brewery’s east side. He ordered Alison to arrive in her own car and leave her phone at home.
Police placed her phone there while broadcasting recorded movement sounds to make it appear active. Alison drove an unmarked vehicle registered to Naomi, hoping Gregory would accept that she could not use the car he had seen before.
Celia sat beside her with the notary stamp in her coat pocket.
“If this goes wrong,” Celia said, “Victor will separate us. He will act as if Gregory makes the decisions, but watch Victor. Gregory wants to win. Victor wants to erase the problem.”
“Where would he take Abigail?”
“The archive. It has one steel door and no windows except the three high circles.”
“Three moons.”
At eight forty-two, Alison turned onto a deserted industrial street. The Kestrel Brewery rose beyond a chain-link fence, its cream brick stained by decades of smoke. Three circular windows glowed faintly on the top floor.
A figure stood behind the center one.
Small hands pressed against the glass.
Alison braked.
The figure disappeared.
Her handbag vibrated once, the silent signal that Vega’s team had seen the same movement.
The loading gate opened. Gregory stepped into the rain and motioned them forward.
He was not alone.
May you like
The woman beside him wore Naomi’s coat.
She had Alison’s face.
