Chapter 5 - The Digital Trail of Theft
Diane’s face drained of color, turning the gray of wet cement. "Arrest? Are you insane? I am a sixty-two-year-old woman! I haven't done anything! My son's wife is a lunatic who attacked *me*!"
"Save it for the magistrate, Diane," Miller said with profound weariness. "Turn around and place your hands behind your back."
"Don't touch her!" Michael yelled, stepping between Miller and his mother, his chest puffing out in an instinctive display of territorial rage. "Do you know who my family is? My father has run a business in this county for thirty years! You have no warrant! You have no right to touch us!"
Officer Davis, a six-foot-two patrolman with shoulders like an iron gate, stepped forward. Within two seconds, he had Michael’s right arm pinned behind his shoulder blade, forcing him down against the stripped vinyl hospital mattress.
"Michael Vance, you have the right to remain silent," Davis recited coldly, clicking the cuffs around Michael’s wrists with a sharp, definitive snap. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
"Get off me!" Michael screamed, his cheek pressed flat against the mattress where he had expected to find me shivering and defenseless. "Claire! Claire, you bitch! I know you're listening! You tell them to drop this! You won't see a dime! I'll take everything! I'll take the car, the house, every single dollar!"
"You don't have every single dollar, Michael," Detective Miller said, leaning down so his face was inches from Michael’s ear. "In fact, according to the emergency asset freeze issued by Judge Albright at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas at nine o'clock this morning, you don't even have access to thirty-five cents for a vending machine."
Diane began to shriek, a high-pitched, manic wail that echoed down the fourth-floor corridor as the second officer secured her wrists behind her beige coat. "Robert! Call Robert! Michael, call your father!"
"Robert is currently being detained at Precision Collision by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and agents from the Department of Taxation," Miller informed them calmly. "Turns out running an illegal sports betting ledger out of an auto-body bay while laundering money through your daughter-in-law's salary leaves an exceptionally clear paper trail when she hands us four years of encrypted backup drives."
Michael stopped struggling.
He lay pinned against the bed, his breathing ragged, his eyes wide and glazed with shock. The realization hit him not as a gradual dawn, but as a physical blow: I had outmaneuvered him. I had anticipated his violence, outlasted his cruelty, and quietly built the scaffold that was about to hang him.
"You're lying," Michael whispered, his voice trembling now. "She didn't have anything. She was too stupid to understand our taxes."
"Your wife has an MBA from Ohio State, Michael," Miller said with cold disgust. "The only stupid thing she ever did was believing you were human."
The officers hauled them out of the room.
Upstairs on the fifth floor, I leaned back against my pillows, tears quietly spilling down my cheeks. My father reached over and squeezed my hand, his grip warm and unbreakable.
"It’s done, Claire," he said.
May you like
"No," I replied, wiping the tears away, my voice steadying with a cold, fierce resolve I hadn't felt since I was twenty-two years old. "It’s just beginning. I want them to see me in court."
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