Chapter 7 - THE FEDERAL RESERVE
Monday morning arrived crisp, cold, and clear.
At 7:45 AM, an armored town car sent by Valerie's firm picked me up outside my building. Valerie was already inside, wearing a sleek black dress suit and holding a thick leather briefcase.
"The Assistant US Attorney, Marcus Vance—no relation to your late husband's family—has reviewed the preliminary toxicology reports and the corporate audit," Valerie said as the car navigated through the morning Baltimore traffic toward the financial district. "He is extremely motivated. A corporate murder involving heavy metal poisoning and financial fraud is the kind of case federal prosecutors dream of."
We pulled up outside the imposing granite facade of the Federal Reserve Bank branch on East Baltimore Street. Two armed security guards escorted us through the security checkpoint, down three flights of subterranean stairs, and into the vault room—a cavernous space of polished steel, reinforced concrete, and rows upon rows of gleaming metal deposit boxes.
A bank vice president verified my identity, checked the death certificate, and matched the silver key—40821—to the dual-key lock mechanism on a large box near the center wall.
He turned his key. I turned mine.
The heavy steel box slid out smoothly.
The vice president bowed respectfully and stepped out of the private viewing room, closing the thick steel door behind him.
I pulled the lid back on box 40821.
Inside sat three black encrypted external hard drives, a stack of bound leather journals, and a sealed glass vial containing a clear liquid, labeled with a hand-written date and serial number.
Beside the drives was a single white envelope addressed to me: Vera.
I opened it.
Vera, If you are holding these drives, it means the end has arrived. Drive 1 contains full video and audio recordings of Mason entering the Towson clinic labs after hours, mixing the Thallium compounds into my supplement batches. I installed pinhole cameras in his facility three months ago after I discovered his embezzlement.
Drive 2 contains a complete digital record of his offshore accounts, detailing every dollar he stole from Vance Architectural Dynamics, along with the wire transfers he made to purchase the raw chemical precursors from an unverified supplier in Eastern Europe.
Drive 3 contains my personal video diary. One hundred and eighty days of documentation, tracking my symptoms, my medical tests, and my thoughts as I prepared this legal trap.
The glass vial contains the unadulterated raw liquid batch taken directly from his mixing room floor.
Do not weep for me, Vera. My body was failing, but my mind remained entirely sharp until the very end. Take these drives to Valerie. Finish what we started. And then... live your life. Build the foundation we always talked about. Use the money to help families who have suffered like us.
I love you beyond the edge of this life. Liam.
Tears ran silently down my face, dripping onto the stainless-steel table. I wiped my eyes, picked up the three hard drives and the vial, and set them carefully into Valerie's leather briefcase.
May you like
Valerie closed the briefcase with a heavy, decisive click.
"It's eight-forty-five," Valerie said, checking her watch. "We have forty-five minutes before our meeting with the US Attorney. Let's go put the final nail in Mason Vance's coffin."
