He swallowed hard. “Marcus came in arguing about the audit I ordered. He was furious about missing funds… but then he walked out. I stayed to review the ledgers.”
“And then?”
“I drank the coffee on my desk.” He touched his throat. “Within ten minutes… my hands went numb. My vision blurred. I tried to walk to the warehouse to find help…”
“Who made that coffee, Mark?”
He took a long time to answer. “Veronica.”
The name hit me like a physical blow.
Veronica Miller was the chief financial officer of Vance Logistics. She had worked alongside Mark and his family for fourteen years. She had attended our wedding. She had held Chloe as a baby. She was the one executive Mark trusted completely with company audits.
My attorney and I immediately contacted state law enforcement and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, turning over the digital logs, the temperature overrides, and the toxicology reports.
The internal financial audit Mark had initiated was recovered from an encrypted folder on his laptop. Inside, investigators found months of fraudulent invoices issued to three shell vendor companies.
Over $3.2 million had been siphoned out of Vance Logistics in under a year for fictitious “refrigeration maintenance.”
State investigators traced the shell corporations directly to Veronica’s brother-in-law.
That explained the money. But it still left Marcus’s role unclear.
