Chapter 7 - The Beneficiary
The name was Margaret Moretti.
Lorenzo's mother.
Clara immediately regretted showing him.
He stared at the document for a long time.
“No.”
“I didn't say she did it.”
“You don't understand.”
“Then explain.”
“My mother inherited nothing when my father died.”
Clara pointed to the records.
“According to these transfers, someone moved money into a private trust.”
“In whose name?”
“Margaret Moretti.”
Lorenzo stepped away.
“She never touched that money.”
“Maybe she didn't know.”
“Then who controlled the trust?”
Clara turned another page.
A trustee's signature appeared.
Richard Bell.
Lorenzo closed his eyes.
The connection was becoming clearer.
Richard had not simply covered an old fraud.
He had controlled the money after Lorenzo's father died.
But there was still a missing piece.
Why had the money continued moving?
Clara examined the final page.
There was an account number.
She compared it with the audit records.
Her face changed.
“This account paid for your father's medical treatment.”
Lorenzo looked at her.
“What?”
“Someone used the stolen money to pay his hospital bills before he died.”
“That doesn't make sense.”
“It does if someone wanted the payments to look like personal expenses.”
Lorenzo's expression hardened.
“My father wasn't dying of heart failure.”
Clara said nothing.
He understood.
“Someone poisoned him.”
“We don't know that.”
“But the records—”
“Prove financial manipulation. Not murder.”
Lorenzo took a slow breath.
He had spent twelve years believing his father died naturally.
Now that certainty was gone.
His phone rang.
His mother's number.
He answered.
“Mom?”
Her voice was trembling.
“Lorenzo, where are you?”
“Why?”
“Because Richard just came to see me.”
Clara moved closer.
“What did he want?”
Lorenzo listened.
His face went completely still.
“What did you give him?”
Silence.
Then his mother whispered:
“The box your father told me never to open.”
The call ended.
Lorenzo looked at Clara.
May you like
They both understood.
The final piece of the old investigation had just been handed to the man they suspected most.
