Chapter 8 - The Shadow Investor
The visitation room at the federal detention center smelled of stale bleach, cold metal, and industrial wax. A thick pane of scratch-resistant plexiglass separated me from the steel stool on the other side.
When the heavy steel door buzzed open, Ethan shuffled in.
He was unrecognizable from the man who had smirked at his groomsmen seventy-two hours ago. His tailored Brioni tuxedo had been replaced by a coarse orange jumpsuit that was two sizes too large. His hair was greasy and unwashed, his stubble patchy, and his eyes were bloodshot, surrounded by dark, bruised hollows of sleepless terror.
He sat down heavily, his hands bound by a belly chain, and grabbed the plastic receiver with trembling fingers.
I picked up my side of the phone.
“You look terrible, Ethan,” I said.
“Clara,” he gasped, his voice raspy and cracked against the plastic. He leaned as close to the glass as the chain would permit, leaving a greasy smudge against the surface. “You have to stop this. Vivian was arrested last night. My mother is sixty-two years old, Clara! She won’t survive prison! Have you lost your mind?”
“Your mother helped you poison my tea for ninety days,” I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion. “She will survive prison just fine. They have excellent medical care for inmates. Better than the care she intended to provide me at Meadowlands.”
Ethan flinched as if I had struck him. He looked down at the steel table, his chest heaving. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Clara. The sedatives—they were just to keep you calm. You were working yourself to death! You were obsessing over those valve trials!”
“Stop lying to me. You’re talking to save your life now, Ethan. The fraud alone carries twenty years. The poisoning charges will ensure you don’t see daylight until you’re fifty-five.”
He began to cry—real, pathetic tears of total self-pity that ran down his dirty cheeks. “What do you want from me? What do you want, Clara? I don’t have anything left! They took my car, they froze the accounts, the apartment is padlocked!”
“I want Nicholas Vance.”
Ethan froze. The tears stopped abruptly, his jaw slacking. “I… I don’t know who that is.”
“Nicholas Vance, CEO of Omnia Health Corp,” I said, resting my elbows on the counter, holding the phone steady. “The man who cleared your twenty-million-dollar sports betting debt through his holding company in exchange for my father’s patents.”
Ethan’s skin took on the same sickly yellow hue Donald Thorne had displayed in the boardroom. “He’ll kill me. If I sign an affidavit against him, I won’t make it through my sentence. You don’t know who these people are, Clara. They don’t just sue you. They erase you.”
“And you think I can’t erase you, Ethan?” I leaned in closer, my eyes locking onto his with an intensity that made him pull back against his chain. “Right now, you are sitting in a federal facility where your cooperation determines whether you spend your sentence in a minimum-security camp in Pennsylvania or a supermax facility in upstate New York where you spend twenty-three hours a day in a concrete box. I hold the keys to your plea deal. The prosecutor doesn't move an inch without my consent as the primary victim.”
Ethan swallowed, his throat making a dry, clicking sound. “If I give him to you… what do I get?”
“You get to serve twelve years instead of thirty,” I said coldly. “You get to live long enough to realize that everything you ever tried to steal has flourished without you.”
He sat in silence for a long time, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like angry hornets. Finally, he closed his eyes and nodded.
“The files are on an encrypted server disguised as an architectural firm’s cloud storage,” Ethan whispered, defeated. “The password is the date my father died. The contracts with Omnia—they’re in the subfolder marked ‘Structural Engineering.’ Nicholas Vance signed them personally using his family trust’s digital key.”
“Thank you, Ethan,” I said, setting the receiver back on its cradle.
I stood up and turned toward the door. Behind me, he pounded his chained fists against the glass, screaming through the barrier, begging me to wait, begging me to tell him he was going to be all right.
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I didn't turn back.
***
