Chapter 5 - The Counter-Strike: Unraveling the Corporate Web
With Ethan out of the picture for the moment, Megan and I went to work with the cold, calculated precision of seasoned professionals. We knew Ethan wouldn't take this lying down; a man who was willing to steal $430,000 and abandon his sick wife in freezing weather was desperate enough to do anything to protect his career and freedom. "He's going to try to scrub the servers," Megan said, pacing the living room with her phone pressed to her ear while talking to her brother Dave at KeyBank. "He's going to call his IT guys at the firm, try to freeze the LLC accounts, or claim identity theft." "Let him try," I replied, sitting cross-legged on the floor with my laptop open, scrolling through the corporate bank statements we had downloaded. "Under Washington state marital asset laws, any funds diverted during an active marriage without mutual consent constitute financial dissipation of the marital estate. Furthermore, because those funds included direct client retainers from corporate accounts, he’s not just facing a civil divorce settlement—he’s looking at felony wire fraud and embezzlement charges." By Tuesday evening, the fallout hit Ethan's law firm like a Category 5 hurricane. Arthur Vance—the senior partner and, ironically, the uncle of Chloe Vance, the woman Ethan had been secretly shacking up with—received our complete forensic dossier via an encrypted Dropbox link at 4:15 PM. By 5:30 PM, Ethan had been summoned to an emergency executive partnership meeting behind closed doors on the 40th floor of the Columbia Center. According to an insider source in the firm's HR department whom Megan had cultivated during our college days, the meeting was absolute carnage. Arthur Vance had practically thrown a heavy mahogany glass pitcher across the conference room table when he saw that Ethan had been skimming retainers from the very manufacturing accounts Arthur had personally assigned to him. Worse still, Arthur discovered that his niece Chloe was not only involved in the embezzlement scheme as a silent beneficiary of the Bellevue penthouse lease, but that Ethan had been using Chloe's name to set up secondary offshore shell companies in the Cayman Islands to funnel the stolen cash. By 8:00 PM, Ethan Cole was no longer a junior partner at one of Seattle's most prestigious law firms. He was an unemployed, disgraced former attorney locked out of his office, his corporate email deactivated, and his personal cell phone bombarded with frantic messages from a furious Arthur Vance threatening both criminal prosecution and immediate disbarment. But Ethan still had one card left to play: me.
