The silence of the power outage was heavy, pressing against the glass walls of the sunroom like deep water. The storm had passed, leaving behind a humidity that made the air feel thick and used.
Maya sat at the teak table, her laptop tethered to her phone’s hotspot, the screen’s blue light carving harsh shadows into her face. Elena sat opposite her, staring at a tablet, her posture rigid. The charcuterie board from earlier had been pushed aside, replaced by a digital landscape of tax returns, PDF invoices, and public record searches.
“Forensic accounting isn’t about math,” Maya murmured, her eyes scanning a line item on the 1994 HOA ledger she had downloaded from the county clerk’s backup archives. “It’s about narrative. Numbers tell a story. You just have to find the plot hole.”
“I thought we were looking for a murderer,” Elena said, her voice tight. “Not a tax cheat.”
“They’re the same thing,” Maya said. She highlighted a row on the spreadsheet. “Juniper said it on the tape. ‘They’re washing it through the fees.’ Look at this.”
She turned the laptop so Elena could see.
“This is the Gables HOA Form 1120-H from 1994,” Maya explained, pointing to the screen. “Standard tax filing for a homeowner’s association. Look at the ‘Maintenance and Repairs’ line item for August.”
Elena squinted. “Forty-two thousand dollars? For one month?”
“Exactly,” Maya said. “In 1994 dollars. That’s nearly ninety grand today. For what? The grass doesn’t grow that fast. The snow hadn’t fallen yet.”
“Maybe they repaved the roads?” Elena suggested.
“I checked the permits,” Maya countered, her fingers flying across the keyboard to pull up a second window. “No paving permits issued in ‘94. No pool resurfacing. No major structural work. This money went out, but nothing came in.”
“So where did it go?”
“To a vendor,” Maya said. “A company called ‘Verdant Solutions LLC.’ They billed the HOA for ‘emergency landscaping and wetlands mitigation.’”
“The Sinks,” Elena realized. “They claimed they were fixing the wetlands.”
“It’s the perfect cover,” Maya said, typing Verdant Solutions LLC Illinois Secretary of State into the search bar. “You dump money into a swamp. Literally. Who’s going to check if you actually dredged the mud? It looks the same before and after.”
The search results loaded.
VERDANT SOLUTIONS LLC Status: Dissolved (1996) Registered Agent: C.P.A. Arthur Miller Principal Office: PO Box 404, The Gables, IL
“Arthur Miller?” Elena asked. “The playwright?”
“A fake name,” Maya said. “Or a lazy one. But look at the address. PO Box 404. That’s the Mailboxes Etc. on Main Street. It’s a drop box.”
Maya leaned back, rubbing her eyes. The caffeine headache was starting to throb behind her temples.
“Here’s the pattern,” she said, her voice dropping into the monotone of a newsroom debrief. “The HOA collects dues. Exorbitant dues. They also accept ‘voluntary contributions’ for special projects from unnamed donors—likely cash injections from whatever illegal enterprise the Blue Suits were running. Gambling? Drugs? Bid rigging? It doesn’t matter. The dirty money goes into the HOA account. The HOA pays ‘Verdant Solutions’ for work that never happens. Verdant Solutions pays… who?”
“How do we find out who owned Verdant?” Elena asked.
“We follow the dissolution papers,” Maya said. “When a company dies, the assets have to go somewhere.”
She clicked through the archives. The screen refreshed.
ARTICLES OF DISSOLUTION: VERDANT SOLUTIONS LLC Asset Distribution: 33% to V-Corp Holdings 33% to T-Squared Investments 33% to R-Dental Management
Maya froze. The names were thin veils, barely concealing the faces behind them.
“V-Corp,” Maya whispered. “Vance.”
“T-Squared,” Elena added, her face paling. “Thorne. Two Ts. Marcus and Elias? Or Marcus and his wife?”
“And R-Dental,” Maya finished, looking directly at Elena. “Russo Dental.”
Elena stood up abruptly, her chair screeching against the slate floor. She walked to the glass wall, turning her back to the data.
“My father-in-law,” she said softly. “Anthony. He was a dentist. He had a practice in the city.”
“He was the Secretary of the Board,” Maya reminded her. “He was one of the men in the photo. One of the Blue Suits.”
“I know who he was,” Elena snapped. “He was a hard man. Cold. He bought this house for us when I got pregnant with my first. He said he wanted his grandson to grow up in ‘safety.’ He paid for the down payment. He paid for the renovation.”
She turned back to Maya, her eyes wide with horror.
“He paid for it with this,” Elena whispered. “With the money from Verdant Solutions.”
“It’s a funnel,” Maya said, the pieces locking together in her mind with a terrifying click. “The HOA wasn’t just a neighborhood government. It was a bank. A washing machine. They laundered the money through the community expenses and paid it out to themselves through these shell companies.”
“And Juniper found out,” Elena said.
“She found out,” Maya agreed. “Maybe she saw the books. Maybe she overheard them in the gazebo. Or maybe one of them—Garrett, or the father of her baby—told her.”
“And when she threatened to expose them,” Elena said, “they didn’t just kill her to save their reputations. They killed her to save their fortunes.”
“Millions,” Maya estimated. “Over thirty years? If they kept this running… Maya, look at the recent files. Is it still happening?”
Maya tabulated the recent years. 2020. 2021. 2022.
The “Maintenance and Repairs” budget was still bloated. But the vendor names had changed. Now it was “Green Horizon Management” and “Gables Infrastructure.”
“It didn’t stop when the fathers died,” Maya said, feeling a wave of nausea. “It just changed hands.”
“Rick,” Elena said. “Chloe is drowning in debt, but Rick drives a hundred-thousand-dollar car and ‘works in finance.’ What finance? Has anyone ever seen his office?”
“And Elias,” Maya added. “He’s the President now. He signs the checks. That’s how he funds the poker habit. He’s skimming from the laundry.”
“And my husband?” Elena asked, her voice trembling. “Mark? Does he know? R-Dental Management… does that money come to us?”
Maya didn’t answer immediately. She typed a query into the state business registry for R-Dental Management.
Current Manager: Mark Russo.
She turned the screen toward Elena.
Elena stared at her husband’s name. She didn’t cry. She went very, very still.
“He pays the mortgage with that account,” Elena whispered. “He pays the private school tuition.”
“He might not know where it comes from,” Maya offered, though it sounded weak even to her ears. “If it’s a legacy trust…”
“He knows,” Elena said bitterly. “Mark handles the finances. He always says, ‘Don’t worry about the money, El. The family takes care of us.’ The Family. I thought he meant his dad’s savings. I didn’t know he meant the Mafia of Bittersweet Court.”
Maya closed the laptop. The battery was at 12%.
“We have the motive,” Maya said. “It’s not just about a secret baby. It’s about a criminal enterprise that has sustained three families for three decades. Juniper Black was going to blow up the bank.”
“And now we’re going to blow it up,” Elena said.
“Yes,” Maya said. “But this changes the threat profile.”
“How?”
“Before, we thought we were dealing with a psycho. A stalker,” Maya said, looking out at the dark houses surrounding them. “But this is business. Organized crime. If we expose this, we aren’t just sending someone to jail. We are seizing their assets. We are taking their homes. We are taking everything.”
“Rick Vance will kill Chloe if he loses the money,” Elena said. “He barely tolerates her spending as it is. If the tap runs dry…”
“And Elias,” Maya said. “If the money stops, the gambling debt catches up to him. He’s a dead man walking.”
“And my husband,” Elena said, her voice cracking. “If I expose this… I am bankrupting my own children.”
Maya reached across the table and took Elena’s cold hand.
“We made a pact,” Maya said. “No secrets.”
“I know,” Elena said. She pulled her hand away and wiped her face. “I’m not going to protect him, Maya. I took an oath to do no harm. Living on this money… that’s harm. That’s poison.”
She looked at the bag of poisoned soil on the counter.
“My father-in-law bought the poison,” Elena said. “My husband manages the money. And I’m the one who has to cut the tumor out.”
Maya looked at the spreadsheet one last time. The numbers were sterile, black and white, but they represented a river of blood that flowed right under their foundations.
“Three families,” Maya said. “Vance. Thorne. Russo. They benefited. But who pulled the trigger?”
“Garrett,” Elena said. “The cop. He wasn’t on the board. He wasn’t getting the money.”
“Maybe he was paid a different way,” Maya said. “Maybe his payment was the badge. They made him Chief. They gave him power.”
She stood up.
“We have the financial motive,” Maya said. “Now we need to connect it to the murder weapon. We need to find the knife. Or the rest of that dress.”
“Where?”
“The only place we haven’t looked,” Maya said, turning to face the sliding glass door. “The house that started it all.”
She pointed not at her own house, but at the dark, looming shape of Number 5 next door. The Thorne house. The Cursed House.
“Elias’s father was the President,” Maya said. “The Architect. If there are records of the murder—real records, not just tax returns—they’re in there.”
Elena stood up next to her. The exhaustion was gone, replaced by a cold, hard resolve.
“Chloe has the digital key,” Elena said. “Let’s go break into a bank vault.”