Chapter 4 - Cracks in the Ice
By the fourth week, Victor Vance was a walking ghost.
He arrived at the headquarters of Apex Insurance in downtown Chicago looking haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his hands twitching nervously at his sides. He marched straight past the reception desk and barged into Sophia Drake’s private corner office, slamming the door behind him.
"You have to clear the claim today, Sophia!" Victor hissed, gripping the edges of her desk and leaning over her. "I don't care about the federal auditors! I need at least five million as an advance payout by Friday!"
Sophia Drake, an attractive thirty-five-year-old woman in an expensive tailored suit, looked up at him with sheer disgust and terror.
"Are you insane?!" Sophia whispered angrily. "The FBI opened a parallel inquiry yesterday! Detective Miller from the state police was in my office for two hours asking about the timeline of your policy amendments!"
"I don't care about Miller!" Victor snarled, his voice cracking with unhinged paranoia. "She’s watching me, Sophia! Clara is watching me!"
Sophia stared at him. "Clara is dead, Victor! You locked her in a negative forty-five-degree industrial vault for seven hours! Nobody survives that! Her body was probably taken by her family or dumped somewhere by whoever broke the lock!"
"Then explain this!" Victor shouted, throwing a manila folder onto her desk.
Inside were printed screenshots of his private bank account. Over the last forty-eight hours, micro-transactions of $0.01 had been deposited into his account every hour on the hour.
The transaction memos read sequentially:
LOOK - BEHIND - YOU - VICTOR - WE - ARE - FREEZING.
Sophia’s face turned deathly pale as she read the memos. "How... how is someone accessing your private account descriptions?"
"It’s her," Victor whispered, his eyes wide and unblinking. "Or it’s Evelyn Reed. I called Evelyn ten times this week, but her office says she took an indefinite leave of absence the morning after Clara vanished!"
What Victor didn't know was that every single word uttered in Sophia’s office was being broadcast live through a parabolic directional microphone positioned in the commercial building across the street—where Evelyn and I were sitting inside a rented office space.
Evelyn lowered her headphones, looking at me. "He’s about to break, Clara. He’s going to try to silence Sophia next. He knows she’s the weakest link in his chain."
"We can't let him hurt her," I said, watching through high-powered binoculars as Victor grabbed Sophia’s arm violently inside her office. "Not because I care about Sophia, but because she’s our master witness."
On screen, we watched Victor pull Sophia close, his voice cold and menacing.
"You listen to me, Sophia," Victor warned her. "You sign the preliminary advance clearance by tomorrow afternoon, or I will make sure the police find the offshore transfer receipts connecting you to the policy fraud. If I go down, you go down with me."
He shoved her back into her executive chair and walked out of the office, slamming the door.
Inside her office, Sophia broke down into hysterical sobs, burying her face in her hands.
Five minutes later, Sophia’s private office phone rang.
She picked it up with a shaking hand. "Hello?"
"Hello, Sophia," a voice said softly through the line.
Sophia froze. The voice was calm, elegant, and chillingly familiar.
May you like
"Clara?" Sophia whispered, her blood running cold. "No... no, this is a joke. Who is this?!"
"It’s no joke, Sophia," I said, leaning back in my chair across the street. "I’m sitting right across the avenue from your window. And I’m offering you the only life raft you have left before Victor puts you in a freezer of your own."
