Chapter 5 - Unraveling the Mastermind
The attempted hit inside a high-security hospital shocked the entire federal law enforcement apparatus. Within six hours, the FBI took over the case from local police, treating the Vance family operations as a high-level domestic criminal enterprise.
Tyler, sitting in a remand cell, cracked under the pressure when he realized his mother had sent hitmen to a public facility. Fearing he would be executed or left to take the full fall for attempted murder, he demanded a proffer agreement with federal prosecutors.
I sat behind the one-way glass in the interrogation room alongside Detective Miller and the FBI lead agent, watching my weak, pathetic son-in-law spill every secret.
"It was all my mother!" Tyler sobbed, his hands shaking in his orange jumpsuit. "She controlled the offshore accounts! She threatened to cut me off completely if I didn't marry Rachel! The trust fund... my mother needed forty million dollars by the end of the month to repay the cartel syndicate that financed her logistics expansion!"
"And the car?" the prosecutor asked sternly. "Who bought the sedative?"
"Vanessa got it from a private contact," Tyler confessed, wiping his nose with his sleeve. "My mother planned the whole thing. She said if Rachel was found dead in a locked car in her mother's driveway with the baby, people would think Rachel went crazy, tried to kill her child, and committed suicide out of guilt. My mother was the one who personally locked the doors and threw the keys into the storm drain down the street!"
"Where is Eleanor now?"
"She has an escape route," Tyler stammered, his eyes wide with fear. "A private airstrip in the countryside near the state border. She has a charter jet waiting to take her to a non-extradition country in South America. She’s leaving tonight at midnight!"
The prosecutor looked up at the one-way mirror and nodded to us.
I checked my watch. It was 9:30 PM. We had two and a half hours before Eleanor Vance vanished forever.
I turned to the FBI agent. "You’re going to intercept her at the airstrip, right?"
"We are," the agent said. "But we need concrete evidence that connects her to the cartel funds and the hitmen she hired tonight. The phone logs aren't enough to guarantee a conviction without the encryption keys stored on her personal master drive."
"I know where that drive is," I said quietly.
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Both agents turned to look at me in surprise.
"My husband didn't just put a camera in the garage," I revealed, a cold smile forming on my lips. "He set up a remote keystroke logger that synced with any device using our home’s Wi-Fi network when Tyler’s car pulled up. Everything Eleanor downloaded or transferred while standing in my driveway is backed up on my late husband’s cloud server."
