Chapter 4 - The Retainer
By 11:00 a.m., I was sitting in a sunlit corner office on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise building in downtown Columbus.
The glass plaque on the door read: Vance & Sterling, Attorneys at Law – White Collar Defense & Corporate Fraud.
Sitting across from me behind a massive oak desk was Evelyn Vance, a formidable woman in her early fifties with sharp gray eyes, silver-streaked hair cut into an immaculate bob, and a tailored navy suit. She was renowned in Central Ohio as one of the most ruthless defense attorneys in the state. She was also expensive—her retainer alone was $7,500.
I had paid it without flinching, using a credit card I had never carried a balance on in my life. My dream of buying a house was rapidly dissolving, but as Officer Miller had warned me, surviving was now my only priority.
Ms. Vance flipped through the copies of my bank statements, the call logs from 1:07 a.m., my hospital parking receipts, and the public LLC records she had pulled up on her double-monitor setup.
For twenty minutes, she didn't say a word. She simply read, her golden pen making swift, precise notes on a legal pad.
Finally, she capped her pen and looked up at me.
“Megan,” Ms. Vance said, her voice smooth, calm, and utterly devoid of panic. “Your father is an idiot.”
I blinked, taken aback by her bluntness. “He... he is?”
“A clever criminal,” Vance explained, leaning back in her leather chair, “would have built a clean paper trail over years to insulate himself while slowly transferring liability to you. Your father, however, acted out of pure, unadulterated desperation.”
She tapped her golden pen against the printout of the 1:07 a.m. call log.
“He tried to extort fifty thousand dollars from your personal bank account via wire at one in the morning using a fabricated medical emergency. When you refused, he panicked. He accessed the online banking portal for M&M Meyer Enterprises at 1:14 a.m. from the IP address associated with his home Wi-Fi in Upper Arlington.”
I sat up straighter. “You can prove he used his home Wi-Fi?”
“The bank’s digital audit trail will record the IP address, device MAC address, and location data for that transaction,” Vance said with a razor-thin smile. “He transferred fifty thousand dollars from a line of credit attached to the LLC directly into a third-party merchant account to cover an overdue debt. Then, at six-thirty in the morning, he walked into a police station and claimed you did it.”
“Why would he do something so sloppy?” I asked.
“Because the merchant account he was paying belonged to a hard-money lender—a private loan sharking operation that finances high-risk construction projects,” Vance said coldly. “Those people don't file lawsuits when you don't pay them, Megan. They show up at your house with baseball bats. Your father was terrified of them. He took the money from the line of credit to save his own skin, and then attempted to pin the theft on you to cover the paper trail before the bank flagged the loan default.”
She turned her monitor toward me.
“Furthermore, he made a fatal mistake when he registered M&M Meyer Enterprises. He listed your home address in Columbus as the secondary business address, but all bank statements were mailed to a P.O. Box in Dublin that only he had a key for. That is classic corporate identity theft and forgery.”
Relief, warm and overwhelming, washed through my chest, but it was immediately replaced by a fresh wave of dread.
“What about my brother?” I asked softly. “Where does Brian fit into all this?”
Ms. Vance looked at me with deep, calculating eyes. “We’re going to find out right now.”
She reached for her desk phone, pressed a button, and put it on speakerphone. “Sarah? Get Detective Sarah Jenkins from Columbus Financial Crimes on the line. Tell her Evelyn Vance is calling regarding the Arthur Meyer grand larceny complaint.”
Three minutes later, a sharp, professional female voice came through the speaker.
“Evelyn. I assumed I’d be hearing from you when this file landed on my desk at eleven.”
“Detective Jenkins,” Ms. Vance said smoothly. “I am formally representing Megan Meyer. My client is currently sitting in my office. We are prepared to fully cooperate with your investigation, including providing digital forensics from her phone, location data from her vehicle, and sworn affidavits from hospital staff proving she was nowhere near her father’s home or business accounts last night.”
Detective Jenkins let out a tired sigh over the speaker. “Evelyn, you can tell your client to take a breath. I’ve already reviewed the preliminary filing your father submitted this morning.”
“And?” Vance asked.
“And Arthur Meyer’s story collapsed an hour ago,” Detective Jenkins revealed.
I gasped, gripping the edge of Vance’s oak desk.
“What happened?” Vance asked calmly.
“We pulled the bank transfer logs from First Buckeye Bank at ten-thirty,” Detective Jenkins said. “The fifty-thousand-dollar wire wasn't initiated by Megan Meyer. It was initiated from an iPad registered to Arthur Meyer’s personal email address. But that’s not the biggest issue here, Evelyn.”
“What’s the biggest issue?”
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Detective Jenkins paused, the sound of papers rustling on her end of the line.
“We picked up Brian Meyer two hours ago at a hotel near the airport,” Jenkins said quietly. “He was attempting to board a flight to Miami with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash in a duffel bag.”
