Chapter 4 - The Interrogation of Carol
The subterranean holding cells beneath the county courthouse were cold, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes that hummed with an uneven, grinding vibration.
Carol Vance sat at the stainless-steel table in Interrogation Room Two, wearing an oversized orange institutional jumpsuit that hung loose over her frail frame. Her styled silver hair had unraveled, her pearls had been logged into evidence, and her hands were secured to the center ring of the table with heavy steel handcuffs.
Across from her sat her high-priced private defense attorney, Harrison Cole, looking exhausted, his leather briefcase open to a stack of unsealed felony warrants.
The heavy iron door clicked open.
Detective Raymond Vance walked in, followed by Assistant District Attorney Marcus Reed.
Behind them, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, was Michael.
Carol looked up, her pale blue eyes instantly welling with theatrical, manufactured tears. "Michael! Oh, my darling boy! Thank God you're here! Tell these animals to take these chains off me! Tell them this is a monstrous misunderstanding! I am your mother!"
Michael did not move from the threshold. He looked down at the woman who had raised him, his eyes stripped of every ounce of filial warmth, cold as granite.
"Emma nearly died last night, Mother," Michael said, his voice dropping into a register of terrifying, quiet stillness. "She is lying in the pediatric ICU with a tube down her throat because she sat in Sarah’s chair."
Carol’s tears vanished in a fraction of a second.
Her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line, the mask of the loving matriarch slipping away to reveal the cold, calculating predator beneath.
"Sarah was destroying this family, Michael," Carol whispered, her voice hardening with venom. "She was an outsider. A girl from a working-class background who came into our home and turned you against your own blood. She convinced you to move fifty miles away. She convinced you to put your father’s land into a joint trust where I had to ask for permission to renovate my own gardens!"
"That land belonged to Dad, Carol," Michael replied. "And Sarah never asked for a single dollar. She spent six years working sixty-hour weeks as an architectural engineer to pay for our home."
"She was going to take everything!" Carol hissed, slamming her handcuffed hands against the metal table, the chains rattling violently. "Your father built that estate for me! Not for some surveyor’s daughter! If you had married the girl I chose for you—if you had married Julianna Sterling—our family would have controlled the entire county council!"
Harrison Cole leaned over, whispering urgently: "Carol, be quiet! Do not say another word on this recording!"
"Let her speak, Mr. Cole," Marcus Reed said, stepping up to the table and laying five glossy photographs of the purple-stickered glasses before her. "Mrs. Vance, we have the forensic botanical mass-spectrometry reports from your greenhouse, the digital receipts from the chemical supply house in Atlanta where you purchased the extraction solvents under a false business name, and the sworn testimony of your daughter, Jenna."
Carol stared at the photographs, her chest heaving, her eyes darting between the evidence and her son.
"I have rights," she spat, her voice trembling with cornered rage. "I am Carol Vance. My family built this town. No jury in this state will convict a grandmother over some contaminated wine."
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"You didn't contaminate wine, Carol," Detective Vance said, leaning down until his face was inches from hers. "You attempted to assassinate four members of your own family for twenty-two million dollars. The State Attorney General has just authorized four counts of Attempted First-Degree Premeditated Capital Murder."
Carol’s breath caught in her throat. Her face turned an ashen shade of gray, her mouth opening and closing like a fish pulled from water, as the realization of her permanent, inescapable ruin settled over her soul.
