Chapter 14 - The Unholy Ledger
By midnight, I was sitting at the kitchen island with Kenneth’s camcorder connected to my laptop.
Kenneth was an idiot, but like all sycophants who work for dangerous people, he was terrified of being discarded. When I extracted the files, I discovered he hadn't just recorded footage of my house. The SD card contained backup video files of church council meetings—audio recordings Kenneth had taken secretly on his phone to protect himself against his own sister.
I plugged in my headphones, clicked on the most recent file dated three days ago, and listened.
Evelyn’s shrill, self-righteous voice came through the speakers with horrifying clarity.
*"—the judge won't care about the daughter's improvements to the dock, Thaddeus. The community believes she's an ungrateful apostate who stole from her dying grandmother. Once the local paper runs the editorial about the church's intended youth sanctuary on the waterfront, the public pressure will force the magistrate to grant an emergency receivership."*
Then came a deep, calculated baritone—Pastor Thaddeus Sterling.
*"We don't need public pressure, Evelyn. We have the tax re-evaluation coming up next Tuesday. The county assessor owes my development fund three hundred thousand dollars on the post-falls bypass project. He is going to reclassify Riley Vance's shoreline as critical wetland buffer zone. Her property taxes will jump from four thousand a year to sixty-eight thousand. She's a freelance environmental writer; she doesn't have the cash flow to contest it and pay the lien simultaneously. She'll default in six months. The trust buys the tax lien at auction, and your cut is fifteen percent of the gross development value."*
*"And Leo?"* Evelyn asked, her voice chillingly indifferent. *"He’s staying in the guest cabin down by the water."*
*"Leo is a convenient casualty,"* Sterling replied smoothly. *"If he violates his probation on that property, the county prosecutor revokes his suspended sentence. With both of them out of the way, the parcel is cleared."*
I sat in the dark kitchen, the headphones humming in my ears, my hands trembling with cold, white-hot rage.
They weren't just trying to take my home. They were using municipal corruption, forged probate documents, and church tax shelters to deliberately bankrupt me and put a nineteen-year-old kid in state prison.
This wasn't family drama anymore. This was organized racketeering masquerading as God’s work.
I opened an encrypted file on my hard drive, transferred the audio files, made three redundant cloud backups, and dialed Marcus Kane’s private cell phone.
He answered on the fourth ring, his voice gravelly with sleep. "Riley? What happened?"
May you like
"Marcus," I said, watching the moonlight shatter across the black surface of the lake. "I need you to schedule a meeting with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Idaho. Not tomorrow. Tonight."
***
