Chapter 4 - The Alibi and the Interrogation
The sun had climbed higher into the sky, burning off the morning mist, but I felt as though I were standing in the middle of a frozen tundra.
"You need to come down to the precinct with us, Mrs. Vance," Detective Miller said, pulling a pair of pristine latex gloves from his coat pocket and snapping them onto his hands, though he hadn't yet placed me in cuffs. "Voluntarily, for questioning. Given the timeline of the crash, the locked estate doors, and the fact that you stand to inherit his entire multi-million-dollar estate upon his demise... well, you're currently our person of interest number one."
Person of interest number one.
The phrase echoed in my brain like a gunshot. Of course. To the police, it was the oldest, most predictable script in human history: The rich wife discovers her husband is cheating, locks him out of the house in a jealous rage, sabotages his car, and leaves him to die on a dark, winding mountain road so she can cash out his life insurance policy.
It was mathematically, cinematically textbook.
And I had handed them the motive on a silver platter by changing the locks just hours before he supposedly crashed his car.
"I didn't touch his car, Detectives," I said, my voice ice-cold, though my pulse was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "I was in my bed all night. Ask my security system. Ask my neighbors. Ask the locksmiths who drilled my front door locks at three in the morning."
"Oh, we'll be checking every single one of those things, Mrs. Vance," Detective Aris replied smoothly, holding open the back door of the unmarked cruiser parked at the foot of my driveway. "Shall we?"
I didn't argue. In high-stakes litigation and criminal defense, panicking is an admission of guilt. You don't fight the cops on your own front porch; you let them play their hand while your legal team prepares to dismantle their assumptions brick by brick.
I grabbed my wool trench coat from the hallway hook, locked my front door behind me, and climbed into the back of the police cruiser without shedding a single tear.
The ride to the Hartford County precinct was a silent, suffocating ordeal. The air inside the cruiser smelled of cheap upholstery and stale coffee. Through the tinted windows, I watched the suburban trees blur past, my mind racing through a hundred different scenarios.
Julian was dead. Or at least, the police believed he was dead. And Elena—my former maid of honor, the woman who had betrayed me—was lying in a hospital bed with severe burns and trauma, unable to speak or defend herself.
Who had driven that car off the bridge?
If Julian was dead, who crashed the vehicle? And if he wasn't dead... where the hell was he?
We arrived at the drab, institutional gray precinct building by 8:30 AM. They didn't put me in a holding cell; instead, they escorted me directly into Interview Room B—a tiny, windowless box featuring a steel table, two bolted-down metal chairs, and a massive two-way mirror mounted on the wall.
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Twenty minutes later, the heavy door swung open, and Detective Miller walked in, carrying a thick manila folder and a steaming paper cup of coffee. He sat down across from me, sliding the folder onto the scratched metal table with a heavy thud.
"Let's talk about last night, Mrs. Vance," Miller began, leaning back and crossing his arms. "Let's talk about the exact moment your husband texted you telling you he was leaving you for another woman."
