👉 Previous Decision: You chose Option 4A-1 – Listen to Chloe’s information in her car away from public eyes.
I paid for my lunch, the half-eaten tuna melt forgotten. Walking out of the diner, I spotted Chloe Zhang’s silver Prius idling at the curb around the corner. I approached cautiously, my mind still a mix of apprehension and desperate hope.
Chloe unlocked the passenger door, and I slipped inside. The car was clean, organized, smelling faintly of citrus. Chloe immediately pulled away from the curb, driving slowly down a side street.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said, her voice still strained. She gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. Marcus is a monster.”
“What do you know about Harold Hobbs?” I asked, cutting straight to the point.
Chloe took a deep breath. “Marcus has him. Badly. Harold Hobbs is a serious gambler. He’s got over $200,000 in private markers with Marcus’s contacts in Vegas.”
My eyes widened. “Two hundred thousand dollars?”
“Yes,” Chloe affirmed, glancing at me briefly. “Marcus found out about his debts months ago. He’s been ‘helping’ Hobbs by ‘restructuring’ them, essentially putting Hobbs deeper in his pocket. It’s leverage.”
“So, the freeze order…” I began.
“It’s Marcus’s doing, directly,” Chloe confirmed, nodding. “He told Hobbs to issue it, to buy him time to sort out his own legal strategy. Hobbs didn’t want to, but Marcus threatened to call in all his debts, ruin his family, expose him to the county ethics board.”
The pieces clicked into place. The sudden, unusual freeze order. The mid-level examiner. Marcus’s ruthlessness. It all made a sickening kind of sense.
“Does Hobbs have a family?” I asked.
“A wife and two kids, college-aged,” Chloe said, her voice softening. “He’s terrified of losing everything. Marcus knows how to find people’s pressure points.”
“How do you know all this, Chloe?” I pressed, trying to keep my voice even.
“I overheard calls, I saw the documents,” she replied, her gaze fixed on the road. “Marcus doesn’t hide much from me. I manage everything for him, his schedules, his projects, his… secrets. I’ve been archiving his personal dealings for years.”
She paused, then pulled over to the side of the road, killing the engine. “This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, but this is the biggest. Beatrice Delacroix’s estate, that’s a huge prize. He wants it badly.”
I stared out the window, processing the magnitude of Marcus’s manipulation. He wasn’t just a cutthroat producer; he was a blackmailer, leveraging personal weakness for financial gain. This was concrete. This was illegal.
“Do you have any proof of this?” I asked, turning back to her.
Chloe reached into a folder on her lap. “Not direct proof of the gambling debts themselves, no. Marcus is too careful. But I can give you something else. Something that will expose his entire claim.”
➡️ Read CHAPTER 6A to continue the story
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