“Don’t give him anything, Dad. No water, no tea, not even a drop of medicine. And please don’t open the blue envelope in the diaper bag.”

Vanessa didn't get far. Two security guards tackled her near the sliding glass doors of the emergency bay, pinning her to the polished floor while Officer Miller cuffed her wrist behind her back.

Mason stood frozen in the middle of the hallway, his face completely drained of life. He looked like a man who had suddenly woken up inside a burning building without remembering who lit the match.

"Dad..." Mason whispered, turning his hollow eyes toward me. "Dad, I swear to God... I didn't know she injected him. I thought... she told me you were getting careless in your old age. She told me you gave him adult cough syrup last month when you babysat!"

"I have never given that child anything stronger than warm water on a spoon, Mason," I said, my voice cold as ice. "And you knew that. But you were willing to let me rot in a prison cell to cover up whatever mess you made at Higgins Logistics."

The police led Vanessa away, screaming threats about her lawyers and how her father's estate would destroy the department. Mason was taken into a separate interview room down the hall for questioning as an accessory to attempted murder and child endangerment.

I stood by Lucas’s crib in the pediatric ICU for three hours. The IV lines running into his tiny arm looked far too big for his skin, but his breathing had stabilized. The antidote administered by Dr. Hayes was doing its work, and the blue tint around his lips was entirely gone.

At 3:00 PM, Detective Thomas Vance from the Savannah Police Department’s Financial Crimes Division walked into the room. He was a thick-set man in a grey suit, carrying a battered leather notebook.

"Arthur Miller?" Detective Vance asked.

"Yes," I replied, without taking my eyes off Lucas.

"I just spent the last two hours reading your old case files from the Treasury Board," Vance said, leaning against the bed rail. "You were the lead auditor who broke open the Port Authority embezzlement scandal back in 2012."

"I was," I said softly. "I retired four years ago."

"Well, your retirement just got cancelled," Vance said, opening his notebook. "Walter Higgins—the accountant from your son's company who died on Thursday—didn't die of a heart attack. The coroner just found trace amounts of the exact same paralytic agent in his tissue samples."

My body went completely still. "Walter was poisoned."

"He was," Vance confirmed. "And six hours before he died, he sent an encrypted file to an off-grid cloud server. The access key was e-mailed to your personal account two weeks ago. You mentioned earlier today that Walter sent you an e-mail?"

"I thought it was just business advice," I said, pull out my phone with a hand that refused to stay steady. "I never opened the attachment because Mason told me Walter was getting paranoid about routine IRS audits."

I unlocked my phone, opened my archive folder, and pulled up the unread message from fourteen days ago.

Subject: Mr. Miller - Higgins Logistics Ledger Audit Attachment: Vault_Key_992.enc

"Can you decrypt it?" Vance asked.

I looked at the code string floating on my screen. As an auditor, every client or colleague who worked with me knew my standard decryption key structure. It was always based on the primary asset account number of the first fraud case we ever solved together.

"Walter worked with me on the Savannah Docks case in 2008," I murmured, my fingers flying over the virtual keyboard. "Account 884-Delta."

I hit enter.

The screen flashed blue, and a three-hundred-page digital ledger unfolded.

Thousands of lines of transaction data flashed before my eyes. Shell corporations registered in the Cayman Islands, falsified shipping manifests for heavy freight containers moving through the Port of Savannah, and wire transfers totaling over twelve million dollars over eighteen months.

And at the bottom of every single authorization slip were two digital signatures.