Chapter 7 - Two Sides of the Coin
The sight of my mother's familiar blue fountain-pen handwriting on the label of that micro-cassette tape hit me harder than any bullet ever could.
Six years ago, on a clear May afternoon two weeks after my fifty-second birthday, the Virginia State Police had called me in Chicago to tell me that my mother Helen had suffered a sudden, massive cerebral aneurysm while driving home from her garden club meeting along River Road, causing her station wagon to veer through a wooden guardrail into the quarry pond.
Because my father had personally signed the waiver declining an invasive forensic autopsy out of respect for my mother's dignity, I had mourned her death as a cruel stroke of nature and kept her worn silver half-dollar coin in my coat pocket every single day since the funeral.
Now, staring at the official state police toxicology vial and the brake-line failure report stamped Confidential that Victor Vance had just lifted out of the false bottom of the walnut box, the air in the damp lumber shed seemed to turn to poison in my lungs.
"You killed her," I whispered, my eyes locking onto Victor Vance before shifting slowly toward my father, who stood trembling beside me with his head bowed in unbearable shame.
"Your mother was a wonderfully stubborn woman, Claire, much like you," Victor Vance remarked conversationally as he slipped the toxicology vial into his camel-hair coat pocket and held up the micro-cassette recorder.
"When she found Luke Dane's unredacted Pier Four structural report in your father's safe six years ago, she didn't just discover that we had stripped the fireproof steel beams out of the warehouse where Luke's wife died—she also discovered the bank ledger showing who actually owned the smuggling shipments inside Pier Four," Vance explained coldly.
Down on the sawdust floor, my ex-husband Mark raised his bruised, bleeding face toward me, tears pouring openly down his cheeks as he shook his head against the gun barrel Denise held to his neck.
"Claire, you have to hear me before they pull the trigger—I never loved this woman, and I never wanted to leave you!" Mark shouted, his voice cracking with three years of pent-up agony that made my heart stop in my chest.
Denise kicked the back of Mark's knee viciously to silence him, cursing him under her breath, yet Mark forced himself back upright on his knees and kept his eyes locked on mine.
"Three years ago on that Tuesday morning in February, Denise and two of Vance's men walked into my office in Chicago and played a copy of that tape proving they had cut your mother's brake lines and injected succinylcholine into her neck before pushing her car into the quarry," Mark wept, every muscle in his neck corded with desperation.
"They showed me live surveillance photos of a hitman sitting outside your elementary school library job in Evanston, and they swore that if I didn't go home that night, tell you I was in love with Denise, divorce you, and let Denise move into my apartment to monitor every breath I took while I laundered their Midwest shipping books, they would murder you the exact same way they killed your mother!" Mark cried out.
I stood paralyzed under the harsh halogen lights as twenty-six years of memories rushed back into my chest in a blinding flood.
That afternoon in our kitchen three years ago, when I had asked Mark if he wanted to save our marriage and he had stared at the stainless-steel refrigerator instead of looking at me, he hadn't been cold or indifferent—he had been looking at the tiny wireless pinhole camera Denise had planted on top of the refrigerator cabinet, biting his tongue until it bled so he wouldn't cry out and sign my death warrant.
For one thousand and ninety-five lonely nights, while I hated his name and twisted my wedding ring around my right hand in bitter pride, my husband had lived as a prisoner in a viper's bed just to keep me breathing.
"How touching that the two of you could clear up your marital misunderstanding right before the end," Victor Vance said dryly, snapping his fingers toward Denise and his three riflemen now that the false bottom of the walnut box was empty.
"Put all five of them inside the old drying kiln at the back of the shed and ignite the sawdust hoppers so the fire marshal can blame another tragic gas leak on the late Luke Dane," Vance ordered.
He never noticed that while everyone was staring at the false bottom of the box, Luke had quietly slid his left foot six inches backward into the shadow of the central timber load-pillar—where a rusted cast-iron turnbuckle held the warehouse's suspended four-ton steel log-crane directly above the halogen floodlights.
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"Claire, drop!" Luke barked, whipping the concealed steel pry-bar from beneath his coat and driving it with all his strength into the corroded shear-pin of the turnbuckle at the exact millisecond he drew a compact backup derringer from his ankle holster and fired straight into the overhead propane heater tank.
With an ear-splitting screech of snapping steel cable and a blinding fireball from the ruptured heater overhead, the four-ton iron crane beam crashed straight down across the center of the sawmill table in a hurricane of flaming sawdust and shattered halogen bulbs—and as Denise spun in the dark and fired two blind rounds toward my chest before the beam hit the concrete, Mark threw himself sideways on his bound knees directly in front of me, taking both bullets squarely in the chest as he knocked me safely behind the iron blades of an industrial forklift.
