Chapter 4 - The Voice in the Night
The interrogation room at the Silver Creek Police Precinct smelled of stale coffee, industrial floor wax, and dry defeat.
Through the one-way glass, I watched my younger brother. Derek sat slumped in a metal chair, the handcuffs chained to an eyelet bolted directly into the center of the steel table. The angry red scratch on his cheek had begun to scab over, standing out starkly against his pale, clammy skin.
He was trembling, his knee bouncing in a manic, unbroken rhythm.
Detective Ramos stepped into the viewing room beside me, holding two paper cups of black coffee. She handed one to me. Her expression was grim, the lines around her mouth set deep.
"The State Medical Examiner just intercepted the transport van Beatrice dispatched," Ramos said quietly. "Your aunt fought the order until the county sheriff threatened to throw her in a holding cell for obstruction. The coroner, Dr. Holbrook, didn't even show up to defend his initial death certificate. He cleared out his personal office twenty minutes ago and vanished."
"What did the state examiner find?" I asked, my fingers crushing the paper cup until the hot liquid nearly spilled over the rim.
"Clara didn't have an aneurysm, Alex," Ramos said, her voice dropping into a somber register. "There was no brain bleed. The preliminary toxicology screen came back positive for massive concentrations of succinylcholine—a powerful, short-acting paralytic agent. It paralyzes every skeletal muscle in the body within seconds, including the diaphragm. You can't breathe. You can't scream. But you remain fully conscious until your brain suffocates."
The room seemed to tilt violently. I gripped the edge of the viewing counter to keep my feet beneath me. The image tore through my mind—Clara, paralyzed on our bedroom floor, unable to draw air, unable to cry out for help, staring up into the faces of the people who had brought it to her, while our daughter watched from the shadows.
"It metabolizes quickly," Ramos continued, her voice tight with anger. "Within forty-eight hours, it breaks down into natural bodily compounds. If Beatrice had cremated her body today as scheduled, there wouldn't have been a trace of chemical residue left in the ash. It would have been the perfect, untraceable murder."
I looked through the glass at Derek. The brother I had protected from schoolyard bullies. The brother whose gambling debts I had paid off three separate times out of my own hard-earned savings.
"Let me talk to him," I said.
"Alex, procedure—"
"You've been questioning him for two hours and he hasn't given you a single name," I interrupted, staring Ramos directly in the eye. "He’s terrified of Vance, but he knows what I’m capable of when someone touches my daughter. Let me in that room."
Ramos studied me for a long, agonizing moment. She reached down, clicked off the recording monitor on the wall, and unlatched the heavy steel door. "Ten minutes. No physical marks. The cameras stay rolling, but the audio feed is switched to my headset only."
I didn't answer. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The heavy door slammed shut behind me with a hollow, metallic thud. Derek jerked his head up, his eyes widening in sheer panic as he saw me standing between him and the exit.
"Alex... please," Derek stammered, pulling back against his handcuffs until the chain strained against the table. "You have to tell them to let me go. You don't understand the people involved here. If they find out I’m talking to the police, they won't just kill me. They’ll kill Teresa. They’ll find Lily—"
I crossed the distance between us in two strides. I didn't strike him. I simply placed both hands flat on the steel table, leaned down until my face was three inches from his, and stared into his dilated pupils.
"Clara was suffocated with succinylcholine, Derek," I said, my voice eerily calm, devoid of all inflection. "She couldn't breathe. She couldn't move. Lily watched her die. And you have Clara’s skin under your fingernails."
"No! No, that wasn't me!" Derek broke, a sob tearing violently from his throat. Tears spilled down his cheeks, mixing with the sweat on his jaw. "I swear to God, Alex, I didn't kill her! I didn't touch the syringe!"
"Then why were you in my bedroom with a crowbar?"
Derek buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders heaving. "I owed twenty thousand dollars to a bookie in North Valley. Last week, two men broke my fingers in an alley behind the bowling alley. They said the debt had been bought out by an executive at your company—by Vance. They told me if I didn't retrieve Clara’s personal laptop and the external hard drive from your home office before you returned from your haul, they’d come for Mom."
"And you brought them into my house," I whispered.
"I went there alone at first!" Derek wept. "I tried to find the drives while Clara was downstairs making lunch for Lily. But she caught me. She caught me tearing apart your desk! She realized what I was looking for. She ran upstairs, locked herself in the master bedroom, and started dialing your satellite phone!"
"Go on," I growled.
"I panicked! I used the crowbar from the garage to force the latch. When I got inside, she fought me like a wildcat. She scratched my face, threw a lamp at me. She screamed that Vance was poisoning the entire county, that your logistics trucks were dumping toxic chemical waste into the old limestone quarries bordering the town’s reservoir, and that she had the transfer manifests to put him in prison for life!"
Derek shuddered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably.
"She wouldn't give me the drives. She had hidden them somewhere I couldn't find. That’s when the doorbell rang. It wasn't Mom. It was a man named Miller—Vance’s private head of corporate security. Mom had let him in through the side gate. Miller walked up the stairs with a black medical kit. He told me to take Lily into the other room. He told me if I stayed in the hallway, I’d be an accessory to what came next."
"And what did you do?" I asked, my voice trembling with murderous rage.
Derek looked up at me, his eyes hollow, broken, completely empty.
May you like
"I took Lily into the nursery," he sobbed. "I held my hands over her ears. But through the walls... Alex, through the walls, I heard Clara trying to breathe. And then... nothing. Just silence. And then Miller walked out, zipped his jacket, and told Mom that Aunt Beatrice was already en route with the transport van."
***
