Read Chapter 16: A Death in the Boardroom

The boardroom fell silent when James walked in at 7:58 a.m. Eight chairs, eight faces. Lockwood wouldn't meet his eye. Whitmore was polishing his glasses with a handkerchief, his hands trembling slightly.

"Before we begin," Whitmore said, "I think we should address the—"

The door burst open. A security guard stood there, pale as chalk.

"Sir. It's Mr. Reeves. In his office."

James was already moving. The CFO's office was two floors down, and he took the stairs three at a time, the board trailing behind him like a funeral procession.

Reeves was hanging from a steel beam. A chair lay on its side beneath him. His tie was looped around his neck, and his face was the color of old newspaper.

Whitmore made a choking sound. Lockwood turned away. But James stood there, staring at the windowsill.

There were gouges in the wood. Four of them. Deep, desperate furrows where fingernails had clawed at the frame. A man who wanted to die didn't fight for his life on the way out.

"Call the police," James said quietly. "And get everyone out of this building."

The police arrived forty minutes later. A Detective Sergeant named Hartley, efficient and bored, took one look at the scene and declared it suicide.

"No note," James said.

"Not uncommon." Hartley was already writing in his notebook. "Financial pressure, job insecurity—"

"His nails." James pointed at the windowsill. "Look at the marks."

Hartley crouched, examined the wood, and stood. "Could've been there for months. Anyone could've made those marks."

"Three hours ago, I saw Reeves in the canteen. He was talking about his daughter's wedding." James kept his voice level. "He was happy."

"People hide things." Hartley snapped his notebook shut. "I'll have my report filed by noon. The coroner will confirm, but this is open and shut. My condolences."

They ruled it suicide by 10 a.m.

James didn't believe it for a second.

He stood in Reeves's office after the police left, alone. The CFO was the only person who had full access to the club's financial records—the real ones, not the sanitized versions shown to the board. His computers were already confiscated. His files were already sealed.

James walked to the window and ran his fingers along the gouges. Whoever killed Reeves had done this to silence the one man who knew exactly where the money had gone. The old regime had been cleaning house, and Reeves was just the latest loose end.

Mark Foley in the boot of that car. Daniel Webb held in a Rotterdam warehouse. Now Reeves, strangled with his own tie and hung from a beam to make it look like suicide.

There was a pattern to it. Marcus Webb had been the architect, the old sporting director pulling strings from the shadows of a Dutch crime syndicate. But Marcus was dead now, killed in that warehouse crossfire. Someone else was running the operation. Someone with access to the club. Someone who knew exactly which threads to cut.

James pulled out his phone and called Eddie. The PI answered on the first ring.

"Reeves is dead," James said. "They're calling it suicide."

A pause. "You don't believe that."

"The windowsill says otherwise."

"Then whoever did it is inside the club," Eddie said. "Or has access to it."

James thought of Whitmore's shaking hands. Lockwood's averted gaze. The board meeting that had been scheduled for 8:15, just seventeen minutes before the guard found the body. If James hadn't been called away, the vote would have gone ahead while Reeves's corpse was still warm upstairs.

"Someone delayed the vote," James said. "Or tried to."

"You think Reeves was killed to stop the audit before you could vote on your recovery plan?"

"I think Reeves was killed because he was going to talk." James looked around the office one more time. The room was spotless. Too spotless. Not a single paper out of place. Someone had cleaned it before the police arrived.

"The old sporting director," James said. "Marcus Webb. I need to know everything about his movements in the last six months. Where he went. Who he met. Every club he visited, every city he stayed in."

"You think he's still alive?"

"He was the architect. But you don't build something like this and leave it running without insurance." James remembered Daniel Webb's testimony—his father had been the man behind everything, but he'd had partners. Powerful ones. "Reeves was the last person in the club who could prove who signed off on those illegal agent deals. Now he's gone."

"So what do you have left?"

James thought about it. Daniel's testimony was hidden, protected, but Daniel was a witness at best—his father's word against a conspiracy that stretched from Rotterdam to the Premier League. Ingrid's story had exposed the surface, but the syndicate had gone to ground.

"There's one person," James said slowly. "The man who ran this club before me. The one who signed the contracts, made the deals, built the network. He's the only one who can prove everything."

"And he disappeared six months ago."

"Which means someone's hiding him. Or keeping him alive as insurance." James looked out the window at the protestors still gathered outside the stadium gates. They were chanting his name now. They trusted him. They didn't know the weight he was carrying.

"I need you to find out where he is," James said. "Eddie, I need you to find Marcus Webb—the real one, not the corpse they showed us. He's either dead in a ditch somewhere, or he's sitting on enough evidence to bring this whole thing down."

"And if he's dead?"

James watched the crowd surge against the barriers. In the distance, a black sedan pulled into the executive parking lot. Randall Pierce, arriving early for his 9 a.m. meeting.

"Then I'll need to figure out who's running this thing from inside my own club." He hung up and headed for the door.

The vote had been postponed. But Pierce was here, and Pierce wanted James to walk away.

James closed the door to Reeves's office behind him and walked toward the boardroom, toward Pierce's waiting car, toward whatever truth the old sporting director had buried in the last six months of his life.

Somewhere in Spain, or Amsterdam, or the backroom of some quiet bar where no one asked questions, Marcus Webb was hiding. And James was going to find him.