Chapter 9 - Unmasking the Matriarch
The door flew off its hinges, crashing onto the hardwood floor with a deafening bang.
The first man through the frame was dressed in tactical black, carrying a heavy polyethylene shield and a stun baton. He didn't expect Daniel to be waiting two feet from the threshold.
Daniel didn't fire the weapon. If he fired, Evelyn’s lawyers would claim he had initiated an armed shootout with ‘court-appointed process servers.’ Instead, Daniel stepped into the man’s guard, seizing the top lip of the riot shield with his left hand, and drove his entire body weight downward. He twisted the shield viciously, wrenching the man’s shoulder out of its socket with a wet pop.
The man screamed, dropping to his knees. Daniel drove the heel of his steel-toed work boot into the contractor’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, and kicked the dropped stun baton across the room.
The second man raised a sidearm, but before he could level the barrel, a heavy ceramic Dutch oven—swung with two hands by Clara—smashed into the side of his skull.
The contractor staggered sideways, blood spraying from his ear, his gun clattering to the floor. Clara did not hesitate; she kicked the weapon under the refrigerator and stood over the fallen man, her eyes blazing with an animal ferocity that made him freeze where he lay.
“Touch my family,” Clara hissed, her voice shaking with fury, “and I will finish what that pot started.”
Outside, the shrill wail of multiple sirens suddenly ripped through the coastal fog.
Blue and red flashing lights illuminated the trees along the driveway as four state police cruisers, led by Detective Vance’s unmarked sedan, tore across the lawn, their tires churning up deep trenches of mud.
Ten armed troopers spilled out of the vehicles, rifles raised.
“State Police! Drop your weapons! Hands on your heads! Down on the ground! Now!”
The third contractor, who had been waiting by the getaway SUV in the driveway, threw his hands into the air and dropped to his knees in the mud without firing a single shot.
Detective Vance came through the shattered front door of the cottage, his service weapon drawn, his eyes sweeping the scene: the two mercenaries incapacitated on the floor, Daniel standing over them with his gun lowered, and Clara holding Noah, breathing hard, her knuckles white around the handle of the cast-iron pot.
“Everyone intact?” Vance asked, breathing heavily.
“We’re fine,” Daniel said, his voice flat. “They had a fraudulent writ from Judge Mercer.”
“Mercer was arrested twenty minutes ago at his country club,” Vance said grimly. “Federal agents intercepted a five-hundred-thousand-dollar wire transfer originating from an account in the Cayman Islands registered to Evelyn Carter’s sister. This was her last play, Daniel. She’s completely out of moves.”
Vance walked over to the man Clara had struck down, clicked a pair of cuffs around his wrists, and hauled him to his feet.
“Get these two into the transport vans,” Vance ordered the troopers. He looked back at Daniel and Clara. “The grand jury hearing has been moved up to tomorrow morning at nine. The judge revoked Evelyn’s bail entirely after the wire transfer was flagged. She’s being brought to the county courthouse in chains.”
Clara looked down at Noah, who had slept through the entire breach, lulled by the familiar sound of his mother’s heartbeat.
“I’ll be there,” Clara said.
Vance looked at her, concerned. “Mrs. Carter, you don't have to testify in person. We have your video deposition. Your physical recovery—”
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“I will be there, Detective,” Clara interrupted, her voice ringing clear and hard as iron. “Evelyn Carter spent six days trying to make me disappear. She’s going to look me in the eye when the state reads her indictment.”
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