Arthur’s mouth opened slightly, the muscle in his jaw twitching violently.
"We also pulled the incorporation records from the Secretary of State in Carson City," Helen continued, tapping a second page in her folder. "Horizon Pacific Development Group LLC isn't an independent third-party buyer that bid on the parcel at a blind county auction. It’s a Nevada shell company registered in January 2016. Its sole managing member is a Delaware holding trust whose primary beneficiary is Arthur J. Vance."
The silence in the room became absolute.
"You deliberately withheld nine thousand dollars in annual tax payments from an escrow account holding over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars of Mr. Miller’s lease revenue," Helen said, her voice steady and devastatingly clear. "You intercepted the county delinquency notices by changing the mailing address on file to your own Wilshire post office box using the forged 2012 power of attorney. You let the property go into tax default, used Mr. Miller’s own stolen escrow funds to purchase the parcel through your Nevada shell company for pennies on the dollar, bulldozed his father’s orchard, and took out an eight-million-dollar construction loan against the land to build this house."
Chloe stared at her boss in sheer, unvarnished horror. The gold pen slipped from her fingers and clattered loudly against the marble floor, rolling a few inches toward Marcus’s scuffed brown shoes.
"You owns Horizon Pacific?" Chloe whispered, her face flushing a blotchy, furious red beneath her foundation. "You told me I was representing an outside investment syndicate! You made me front forty-eight thousand dollars of my own money for the custom staging, the architectural shoots, and the catering because you said the developer had a strict reimbursement cap until closing!"
"Shut up, Chloe!" Arthur barked, his suave executive mask shattering completely as he whirled on her. Sweat soaked the collar of his white dress shirt. "Nobody asked you to spend forty-eight grand on Italian sofas! And what were you doing two minutes ago with your checkbook out, huh? Trying to pay off a material witness in the middle of the living room?!"
"Because you told me he was a senile trespasser with a fake library printout!" Chloe screamed back, her voice echoing wildly off the twenty-foot ceilings. "I turned down the Bel-Air listing for this! Six months of my life! My savings are gone, and you forged the damned title?!"
"You're fired!" Arthur roared, pointing a trembling finger at the front doors. "Effective immediately, your license is terminated from my brokerage! Get your staging junk out of this building and get off the property!"
"You can't fire me from a brokerage that isn't going to exist by Tuesday morning!" Chloe shrieked, snatching her designer handbag off the console table with shaking hands. She looked at Helen Cho, her blue eyes wide with panic. "I didn't know! I swear to God, Ms. Cho, I only joined the firm fourteen months ago! He handed me the cleared title packet from the escrow company in April! Check my emails—I didn't even know who Marcus Miller was until twenty minutes ago!"
"My investigators will take your formal statement at our downtown office tomorrow morning at nine, Ms. Taylor," Helen said coolly, handing Chloe a business card. "And I strongly suggest you bring every invoice and email regarding that fifty-thousand-dollar check you just tried to write."
Chloe swallowed hard, snatched the card without looking at Arthur, and practically ran toward the front doors, her red heels clicking frantically across the marble until she disappeared into the bright driveway outside.
Arthur stood alone beside the glass table. His chest heaved inside his tailored navy vest. The vast, echoing luxury of the twenty-million-dollar room—the crystal chandeliers, the curved gold banister, the gleaming marble—suddenly looked less like a monument to his wealth and more like a brightly lit cage.
He looked at Helen Cho, his voice dropping to a hoarse, desperate rasp. "I want my attorney. I am not answering another question without counsel present."
"That is entirely your right, Mr. Vance," Helen replied, pulling a blue-backed legal document stamped by the Los Angeles County Superior Court from her briefcase and setting it squarely in the center of the glass table. "This is a certified Notice of Lis Pendens and an emergency administrative freeze issued at nine o'clock this morning on Assessor’s Parcel Number 4391-018-022, alongside an immediate suspension of your corporate real estate broker’s license under Business and Professions Code Section 10177."
She closed her briefcase with two sharp metallic clicks.