The Man Beneath the Company
Chapter 10 - The Man Beneath the Company
Baines’s escape route led to a private elevator that bypassed the lobby and opened into an underground parking structure.
Security footage showed him entering a gray sedan registered to a Whitmore subsidiary. The car disappeared before police sealed the exits.
Rebecca blamed herself.
Eleanor did not allow it.
“Your father spent forty years trusting that man,” she said. “You were given forty minutes to catch him.”
Investigators searched Baines’s office and found evidence of a second life: foreign passports, encrypted phones, and property records under three identities. He had been stealing from the company for at least fourteen years.
The scheme began small. Inflated invoices. Fake consultants. Supplier rebates redirected through shell firms. Thomas noticed irregularities only after the losses became large enough to threaten a defense contract.
That was when Baines placed Vanessa near Daniel.
But one question remained. Why wait nearly a year after Thomas’s death to seize the family shares?
The answer was inside the original Whitmore partnership agreement.
Thomas had created a succession clause requiring unanimous consent from Eleanor, Daniel, and Rebecca before voting control could transfer outside the bloodline. Vanessa’s forged trust covered Eleanor and Daniel, but Rebecca’s consent was impossible while she lived.
The false casualty notice had a second purpose.
Baines planned to produce a forged death certificate later, then claim Rebecca’s shares passed to Eleanor. Once Eleanor was declared incompetent, Vanessa could sign for everything.
Rebecca read the clause twice. “They didn’t just need Mom to believe I was dead. They needed the courts to believe it too.”
Officer Ortega received a call from the airport. A man matching Dr. Mercer’s description had attempted to board a private flight using a false passport. He was detained.
Mercer asked to speak with Rebecca alone.
She refused. Eleanor went instead.
Behind interview-room glass, Mercer looked smaller than he had in photographs.
“I never meant to kill Thomas,” he said.
“You gave him unrecorded medication before surgery.”
“Baines said it would postpone the procedure. Thomas was going to expose us. I needed time.”
“But the procedure continued.”
Mercer nodded. “Someone changed the dosage after I left.”
“Who?”
He looked directly into the camera.
“Vanessa.”
When confronted, Vanessa laughed from her holding cell.
“Of course he said that,” she replied. “A doctor knows exactly how to make murder look like medicine.”
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Two criminals were accusing each other.
Only Thomas’s final hours could reveal which one was telling the truth.
