Chapter 5 - The War Room
By eight o’clock Tuesday morning, Harold Finch’s conference room looked like a municipal records repository after an earthquake.
Harold sat at the head of the long mahogany table, surrounded by stacks of green-bar ledger paper, county deed registries, and three half-empty cups of black coffee. Carys was seated by the window, her laptop open, cross-referencing corporate registry filings through the Ohio Secretary of State’s online database. Arden sat next to me, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, wearing an old wool sweater of Frank’s that hung loose around her shoulders. She looked pale, but the dazed, terrified look from the night before had hardened into something cold and sharp.
"All right," Harold said, clearing his throat and laying a flat palm on the yellow legal pad in front of him. "Let’s lay the battlefield out so everyone understands where the artillery is aimed."
He turned to Arden.
"First: Grant’s little marketing firm, Voss Global Media. Carys did some excellent digging on this yesterday. It’s a sham."
Arden blinked. "A sham? He went to the office every single day, Harold. He wore a suit. He carried a leather briefcase."
"He went to a twenty-dollar-a-day hot-desk at a shared executive suite in Akron," Carys interjected, turning her laptop toward Arden. "He had three freelance graphic designers he hired off the internet for piece-work, and his 'corporate clients' were mostly small car dealerships and local strip-mall chiropractors. He hasn't billed a client more than three thousand dollars in a single month since March."
"Then where was the money coming from?" Arden asked, bewildered. "The five-thousand-dollar family trips to Hilton Head? The country club social membership in Columbus? The lease on the BMW?"
"Right here," Harold said, tapping a red folder. "He was running a classic domestic Ponzi scheme. He used your mother’s forty-thousand-dollar down payment to secure the primary mortgage. Then he took out the seventy-five-thousand-dollar HELOC to pay the mortgage and keep up appearances when his agency stalled out. When the HELOC ran dry, he started tapping your mother’s emergency credit card for daily luxury expenses—steaks, gas, clothes, golf."
Harold looked at me over the rims of his glasses.
"And then," Harold continued, "came the Wallace factor."
"What does Wallace have to do with this?" I asked, leaning forward, my hand resting on my throbbing hip.
"Wallace Voss is in serious financial trouble of his own," Harold said, pulling a printout from the Franklin County Municipal Court index. "Wallace’s commercial development company, Voss Properties LLC, has three pending foreclosure actions against two suburban strip malls in Westerville. The vacancy rate on those properties is north of sixty percent. He owes two point four million dollars to a regional lender in Pittsburgh, and his personal guaranty is about to be called."
Arden gasped. "Wallace? But Wallace always talks about his real estate holdings! He treats everyone like they’re peasants!"
"He’s leveraged to his eyeballs, Arden," Harold said bluntly. "The Voss family has been running on the fumes of an old family trust that ran out of money in 2018. That’s why Grant was buying his father those expensive dinners in Columbus. Grant was trying to convince Wallace that *he* was the successful one, that *he* was the big-city marketing mogul who could bail the family out. They were both lying to each other. A father and son caught in a mutual circle-jerk of phantom wealth, while your mother paid for the ribeyes."
Carys let out a bitter, vindictive laugh. "My God. They’re like two drowning men trying to steal each other’s life jackets."
"Precisely," Harold said. "Which brings us to our strategy."
He slid three documents in front of Arden.
"Document one: A petition for legal separation and an emergency motion for temporary orders in the Portage County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division. We are asking for immediate exclusive occupancy of the Sycamore Lane home, temporary custody of Toby, and an immediate restraining order enjoining Grant from liquidating, transferring, or encumbering any asset worth more than one hundred dollars."
Arden didn't hesitate. She picked up Harold’s heavy steel pen and signed her name on the line: *Arden Whitcomb Voss*.
"Document two," Harold continued, slide another paper over. "An emergency affidavit of adverse claim filed directly with Huntington National Bank’s fraud division. We are formally notifying the lender that the seventy-five-thousand-dollar HELOC was obtained through the execution of a fraudulent affidavit of title that concealed an existing encumbrance—namely, Leona’s promissory note. This will immediately freeze the line of credit and trigger an internal bank investigation into Grant’s application."
Arden signed again. Her hand didn't shake.
"And document three," Harold said, looking at me. "The criminal referral. Leona, this is your call. Once I send this packet to the Portage County Prosecutor, the train leaves the station. You can't pull it back because Arden feels sad, or because Grant starts crying about his clean record. Fourth-degree felony grand theft and unauthorized use of a telecommunications device. It carries up to eighteen months in the Marysville or Lorain Correctional Institution."
The room went completely silent.
The radiator clanked against the wall. Outside, the gray Ravenna snow continued to fall, burying the sidewalks in cold, white silence.
Arden looked at me. For the first time in six years, I saw my daughter’s true face—not the timid, anxious girl who walked on eggshells around a narcissistic husband, but the girl who had helped me pull an engine out of an old Ford tractor when she was seventeen, wiping grease off her nose with the back of her sleeve.
"Do it, Mom," Arden said softly. "Sign it."
I looked at Harold. "Send the packet."
I took the pen and signed my name: *Leona Whitcomb*.
Harold smiled—a slow, predatory grin that belonged to an old country lawyer who had just smelled blood in the water. He gathered the papers into his leather briefcase, snapped the brass latches shut, and checked his pocket watch.
"The Domestic Relations judge is on the bench until noon," Harold said, standing up. "I’ll have the temporary restraining order and the lockout order signed before he goes to lunch. Arden, do you have the spare keys to the Sycamore Lane house?"
"I do," she said.
May you like
"Good," Harold said. "Because by three o’clock this afternoon, we’re going to have the locks changed. And if Grant Voss shows up on that porch to collect his clothes, he’ll do it with a Portage County sheriff’s deputy standing right behind him holding a pair of handcuffs."
***
