Chapter 5 - The Leak
By 8:00 a.m. on Friday, the seventy-two-hour clock was down to twelve.
Instead of preparing the breakfast rush, I was sitting in the corner booth of the diner with Marcus Vance, the young investigative reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times who had spent his childhood eating my blueberry pancakes. He had three recorders on the table, his laptop open, and his face pale as he looked through the yellowed pages of Richard's ledger.
"Evelyn, this is... this is explosive," Marcus said, his fingers flying across his keyboard. "It’s not just the union pension money. I’ve been running the shell companies through the state registry. Robbins Holdings is still active. And do you know who the primary shareholder is now?"
"Margaret," I said.
"No," Marcus said, turning the screen toward me. "It’s Grant. He became the sole trustee of the holdings company last year when his father died. Every single dollar that Holloway Select Markets makes from their property leases is being funneled directly into this offshore account to avoid corporate taxes. We’re talking about forty million dollars in unpaid state and federal taxes over the last ten years alone."
"And the domestic abuse?" I asked, pointing to the photographs Marcus’s photographer had taken of Hannah’s face the day before.
"The medical examiner’s office is already looking into the clinic in Lake Forest," Marcus said. "I’ve got a contact in the department who says they’ve had three complaints about that doctor falsifying injury reports for wealthy families in the suburbs. If we run this story with the financial documents, it’s going to trigger a federal raid on the Holloway corporate headquarters by noon."
"Run it," I said.
"Evelyn, if we do this, there’s no going back," Marcus warned, his eyes serious behind his glasses. "The Holloways will lose everything. Their stores will be seized, their assets frozen. But they will fight. They’ll try to drag you and Hannah through every dirty court in Cook County before they go down."
"They’ve been dragging my daughter for four years, Marcus," I said, looking toward the kitchen where Hannah was quietly helping Frank stack clean coffee mugs. "It’s time they found out how heavy the mud is down here."
The first edition of the online paper dropped at 10:14 a.m.
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The headline was simple, black, and carried the kind of weight that makes stock prices drop before the lunch bell rings: THE HOLLOWAY FRAUD: LUXURY GROCERY EMPIRE BUILT ON STOLEN PENSIONS AND OFFSHORE SCHEMES.
Below the headline was a high-definition photograph of the 1998 ledger page with Margaret Holloway's signature, followed by a detailed, step-by-step analysis of the tax evasion scheme. And right next to it was the interview with Hannah, her face un-retouched, her eyes looking straight into the camera as she described the night her husband watched his phone while she bled.
