Chapter 3 - The Statement
The interrogation room at the 17th Precinct smelled of floor polish, stale coffee, and rainy wool.
A female detective named Miller sat across from Emily, a recording device hummed softly between them on the scratched laminate table. Julian Vance stood in the corner of the room, his arms crossed over his charcoal chest, his quiet presence acting like a suit of armor around the two sisters.
"Let me get this straight for the log, Miss Carter," Detective Miller said, leaning back in her chair and clicking her pen. "At eight-thirty this morning, you arrived at the hotel’s private bridal suite on the thirty-second floor."
"Yes," Emily said, holding her bandaged hands flat on the table. A police nurse had cleaned the cuts and applied iodine, but the deep purple contusions around her wrists were darkening by the hour. "At nine-fifteen, a member of the hotel staff—a man wearing a maintenance uniform—knocked on the door. He said Mrs. Whitman needed me to approve the floral arrangement in the lower basement staging area."
"And you went down alone?"
"I was nervous, stressed, and trying to keep the peace," Emily explained, her voice steady now, devoid of tears. "Mrs. Whitman had complained about every single decision I made for eleven months. I thought if I just went down and signed off on the flowers, it would avoid another argument before the ceremony. When I walked into the B3 staging vault, the door slammed shut behind me. I heard a heavy mechanical deadbolt engage from the outside."
"Did you scream? Try to call out?"
"There is no cell reception on level B3," Julian Vance interjected smoothly from the corner. "It's a reinforced utility vault housing the building's legacy steam pipes. The walls are two-foot poured concrete. Miss Carter spent two and a half hours banging on the heavy steel door until her fists bled. When she realized no one was coming, she used an iron pipe bracket to break open a high transom window leading into the secondary service shaft."
Detective Miller looked up from her notes, her eyes softening with genuine pity as she looked at Emily. "You crawled through a grease shaft in a wedding dress?"
"I crawled through three hundred feet of steel ductwork," Emily said flatly. "I dropped twelve feet onto a metal catwalk, kicked through a wired security glass transom, and ran up twenty-six flights of fire stairs because the elevators required a keycard I didn't have."
"And when you arrived at the chapel?" Miller asked.
"I found my fiancé standing at the altar with Vanessa Reed," Emily said. "Wearing the dress I spent my life savings on. Wearing my grandmother's jewelry."
The door to the room opened, and a young officer stepped in, holding a tablet. "Detective? We have two attorneys in the lobby demanding to see Miss Carter. They say they represent the Whitman Group and that this is a private domestic matter that needs to be settled out of court."
Julian Vance stepped forward, pulling a silver fountain pen from his coat pocket. "Tell them that Julian Vance is currently acting as Miss Carter’s legal counsel. Tell them if they don't leave the precinct floor within sixty seconds, I will file an emergency injunction freezing the Whitman Group's liquidity assets under suspicion of corporate kidnapping and felony conspiracy."
The young officer blinked, nodded quickly, and ducked back out the door.
Detective Miller let out a low whistle. "You don't play around, Mr. Vance."
"I despise sloppy criminals, Detective," Julian replied, his blue eyes sharp as ice. "And Eleanor Whitman is exceedingly sloppy. Miss Carter, the hotel’s security footage from level B3 has already been requested under subpoena. However, my office received an anonymous tip twenty minutes ago."
Emily turned in her chair. "What tip?"
"The hotel’s chief of security, a man named Donald Briggs, received a wire transfer of fifty thousand dollars at eight o'clock this morning," Julian said, leaning over the table. "The sending account was a shell corporation registered in the Cayman Islands. The beneficial owner of that shell corporation is Vanessa Reed's father."
Emily's breath caught in her throat. "Vanessa's father? But... why? Why would Vanessa help Eleanor lock me away?"
"Because," Chloe chimed in, grabbing her sister's hand, "Vanessa’s father’s firm was facing bankruptcy last month. The only thing that saved them was a multi-million-dollar buyout offer from the Whitman Group. It wasn't just a swap of brides, Emily. It was a business merger."
The sheer scope of the conspiracy settled into the small room like heavy fog. They hadn't just wanted to get rid of Emily because she was a middle-class schoolteacher who didn't fit into their high-society dinners. They had systematically planned to replace her to seal a corporate transaction.
Emily looked down at her bandaged hands, her chest rising and falling slowly.
"Mr. Vance," Emily said, her voice dropping an octave, becoming dangerously quiet.
"Yes, Miss Carter?"
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"Can you destroy them?"
Julian Vance allowed a slow, razor-thin smile to touch his lips. "Miss Carter, destroying corrupt empires is the only reason I wake up in the morning. Let's go to my office."
