Chapter 11 - The Visitor in Glass
Late that afternoon, I received an unexpected phone call from Detective Lawson.
"Connor, you need to be aware of a development," Lawson said, his tone unusually cautious. "Teresa’s public defender filed an emergency bail hearing under the oversight of an appellate judge. It was supposed to be rejected outright, but someone just posted her two-million-dollar cash bond."
My grip tightened around the steering wheel as I sat in my parked SUV outside the county jail. "What do you mean, two million cash? Her accounts are frozen solid!"
"Her accounts are frozen, yes," Lawson replied grimly. "The bail was posted via a cashier’s check drawn from an institutional account owned by Vanguard Horizon Investments—an offshore private equity fund. Connor... that’s not an inheritance trust. Someone outside your family just bought Teresa's freedom."
A cold premonition shot through my veins. "Where is she now?"
"She's still being processed through release intake downstairs. If you want to see her before she walks out those doors, you have about fifteen minutes."
Ten minutes later, I was led into the non-contact visitation room in the basement of the detention facility. Across the thick pane of reinforced glass, Teresa sat in a beige holding uniform, waiting for her civilian clothes to be returned.
She looked different from the broken, screaming woman in the courtroom.
Her hair was brushed back smoothly, and a smug, chilling serenity had settled over her features. She looked at me not with fear or defeat, but with the cold, calculated triumph of someone who had just drawn an ace from an unseen hand.
I picked up the heavy telephone receiver mounted on the wall. She mirrored the motion on her side, pressing the plastic against her ear.
"I see you came to see me off, Connor," she said, her voice dripping with sickly sweetness.
"Who paid your bail, Teresa?" I demanded, my voice dead and menacing. "Every dime you embezzled from my father is frozen. You have no legal assets left."
Teresa leaned forward, her red lips parting into a razor-sharp smile that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
"You always were naive, Connor. Just like your father," she whispered, her eyes gleaming with malice. "You thought my world began and ended with Arthur Bradley’s little company? You thought I spent thirty years among the most powerful families in this state without making powerful allies?"
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"You're a convicted felon waiting for trial," I countered. "You violate that protective order by one inch, and you'll spend twenty years in a maximum-security prison."
"A trial that will never happen, my darling boy," Teresa laughed softly, a low, unsettling sound that echoed through the phone line. "The people who just posted my bond don’t care about your little security tapes. They don't care about your hysterical little wife or your brat. They care about what I know. And what I hold in the private vaults of Vanguard Horizon."
