Chapter 10 - The Iron Cage
The heavy iron security doors of the federal detention facility slid shut with a deafening, mechanical clang that made my teeth ache.
Ryan and I sat across a scratched stainless-steel partition in the non-contact visitation room. When the guard finally opened the reinforced door on the opposite side, the woman who shuffled in bore almost no resemblance to the proud, impeccably groomed matriarch who had ruled our family and her church for a quarter of a century.
Diane wore an ill-fitting, bright orange jumpsuit. Her hair, usually styled in pristine silver waves, hung limp and unwashed around her hollow face. The designer jewelry was gone, replaced by plastic identification bands around her thin wrists. When she saw Ryan, her eyes lit up with desperate hope, but Ryan kept his arms crossed, his expression carved from stone.
"Ryan, darling, thank God you came," Diane cried, her voice cracking as she reached for the partition glass. "You have to get me out of here. The women in this cell block... they are animals. They took my shoes. The guards won't listen to me!"
"Save your breath, Mom," Ryan said, his voice flat and dangerously low. "A burner phone was left on our porch yesterday. A man called and said you were just an account holder for the Covenant Trust."
At the mention of that name, Diane physically flinched. The color drained from her cheeks until she looked like a walking corpse. She pulled her hands away from the glass, her fingers trembling uncontrollably against her chest.
"Julian Thorne," she whispered, her voice barely audible through the perforated steel speaker. "He found you."
"Who is he, Diane?" I interrupted, leaning closer to the glass. "He had someone watching Lily in our backyard. He threatened to kill our daughter."
"Julian Thorne is the devil himself," Diane sobbed, tears cutting through the grime on her face. "Twenty years ago, when your father died, Ryan, the church building fund was nearly bankrupt. Julian approached me at a charity gala. He was a multi-millionaire developer, a pillar of the community, an elder of the diocesan council. He offered to inject millions of dollars into our ministry."
"In exchange for what?" Ryan demanded.
"For total control of the financial routing," Diane confessed, clutching her head in her hands. "He told me all I had to do was sign off on his invoices and keep the board from asking questions. He gave me cash, Ryan! He paid for my cars, my vacations, your private high school tuition! I thought he was just a generous benefactor who wanted to avoid taxes!"
"You knew he was dirty," Ryan said, his disgust palpable. "You knew the whole time."
"I didn't know how bad it was until five years ago!" Diane shrieked defensively. "When Marcus refused to sign the building permits for the youth center, Julian told me that if I went to the police, he would release forged documents showing that I was the mastermind. He made me put the property deed in my LLC so that the state would come after me, not him!"
"Where are the real records, Mom?" Ryan asked, leaning forward until his face was an inch from the glass. "Thorne wants his fourteen million back. The state has it frozen. The only way we protect Lily is by giving the FBI enough proof to put Thorne in a cage right next to you."
Diane swallowed hard, her eyes darting nervously toward the guard standing near the door.
May you like
"In the church," Diane whispered, trembling. "The old rectory basement has a sealed coal cellar behind the boiler. There is a floor safe beneath the concrete foundation. The combination is your birthdate, Ryan. Everything is in that safe—the encrypted offshore hard drive, the original signed trust agreements, and the blackmail Thorne kept on the county judges."
She looked at her son with tears pouring down her face. "Ryan, please. Don't go there. If Julian's men catch you in that basement, they will bury you in it."
