Chapter 8 - The Ashes of ApexVisiting day at the women's correctional facility was grim and grey.
Brenda walked into the booth wearing a drab, ill-fitting orange jumpsuit. Her hair was greying at the roots, her skin looked sallow without her expensive cosmetics, and her hands were rough and unmanicured.
She slammed the receiver against her ear when she saw me sitting across the thick glass.
"Came to gloat, Jessica?" she sneered, though her voice lacked its old venom. "Satisfied? You destroyed my family. You put your own husband in prison."
"You put him there, Brenda," I replied calmly into the phone. "The day you taught him that people were just tools to be used and discarded."
She glared at my neck. Her eyes widened as she noticed the diamond necklace resting against my collarbone.
"Is that... my necklace?" she gasped, her voice trembling with rage.
"It was your necklace," I said, leaning closer to the glass. "I bought it at the state liquidation auction yesterday. I also bought the Apex brand rights, the commercial building downtown, and the patent portfolio."
Brenda slammed her fist on the metal counter. "You took everything from us!"
"No, Brenda. You gave it away the moment you decided to treat my father's memory like trash." I reached into my bag and pulled out a fresh document, pressing it against the glass. "This is the deed to my father's house. Fully cleared. No liens. No mortgages. And this..." I showed her another document, "...is the registration for the Arthur & David Vance Financial Protection Foundation. Itâs a non-profit dedicated to helping victims of white-collar financial abuse. I funded it with the proceeds from liquidating Apex's residual assets."
Brenda stared at the paper, her breath fogging up the glass. "You... you used our company to start a charity?"
"Your company is dead, Brenda. But my father's name lives on."
THE FULL ENDING: The Final TwistI stood up to leave, but as I reached the heavy security door, I stopped and turned back to look at her through the glass.
"Oh, Brenda," I said, holding up the phone one last time. "There's one last thing you should know. The forensic audit didn't just find the money you stole from me."
Brenda froze. Her eyes darted wildly. "What are you talking about?"
"My father wasn't just a forensic accountant for private firms," I said, a faint smile touching my lips. "Thirty years ago, before he retired, he was the senior field analyst for the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation Division. Do you remember the offshore trust your late husband set up in 1998?"
Brendaâs face went completely ghostly white. The color drained from her lips until she looked like a corpse. "How... how do you know about that?"
"My father kept a duplicate set of encrypted files in a safety deposit box that only opened upon his death," I revealed. "He knew your late husband was running tax evasion schemes through shell companies long before I ever met Connor. He warned me about your family before he passed, but I was too blindly in love with Connor to listen back then."
I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of five years of suffering lift completely off my shoulders.
"My father set a trap thirty years ago, Brenda. He let your family build your fraudulent empire, knowing that the moment you tried to steal from his bloodline, the automated filing triggers would deliver thirty years of un-redacted IRS tax fraud evidence directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Brenda began to shake violently. "No... no, please..."
"The state charges were just the beginning, Brenda," I said softly. "The federal prosecutors are indictment-bound tomorrow morning for tax evasion, wire fraud across state lines, and money laundering spanning three decades. You aren't doing eight years, Brenda. You're doing the rest of your life."
May you like
The security door buzzed open behind me.
I hung up the plastic phone, letting it dangle by its metal cord against the partition, and walked out into the crisp, clean air of freedom, leaving Brenda Montgomery screaming silently behind the unbreakable glass.
