The masonry had been replaced.

Wyatt leaned back in the interview room with a smug grin. “Grandpa was delirious, Peyton. Your whole circus depends on the ramblings of a dying old man.

You’ve got nothing.”

Then the hospital called. Franklin had survived the emergency detox.

At 4:12 a.m., he gave a flawless, legally binding recorded statement naming all three of them. And he cleared up the one thing the conspirators had never understood: the ledger was never paper at all.

Midnight Ledger wasn’t a notebook. It was the master password to an encrypted cloud archive he and I had built together years ago, for his corporate security.