Chapter 10 - The Empty Cell
The phone pressed against my father’s ear seemed to radiate a sudden, suffocating chill that instantly sucked all the warmth out of the hotel corridor. I stared at his face, watching in real-time as the color drained entirely from his features, leaving him looking stunned and pale.
"Repeat that," my father commanded, his voice dropping into that terrifying courtroom register that usually signaled an opponent's fatal mistake. "How is that even possible? He was booked into maximum security less than twenty minutes ago."
Marcus Vance stopped walking toward the elevator, turning back with a sharp frown. "Arthur, what's going on? Who is on the phone?"
My father slowly lowered the phone, his hand trembling slightly as he stared blankly at the polished carpet between us. "That was the intake warden at the county detention center. Owen... he never made it to his cell."
A cold spike of adrenaline pierced my chest. "What do you mean he never made it? Did he try to run during transport?"
"No," my father replied, his voice tight and strained. "The transport van arrived at the facility ten minutes ago. When the guards opened the rear doors, the cuffs were locked to the interior railing, and Owen was gone. The vehicle never stopped between here and the jail."
Marcus cursed loudly, pulling out his tablet once again and tapping furiously against the screen. "That's a secured federal transport unit. You can't just vanish from the back of a locked van while it's moving down the interstate at seventy miles per hour unless..."
"Unless someone on the inside unlocked the partition," I finished the thought, the horrifying realization dawning on me like a dark storm cloud. "Evelyn didn't look panicked when they arrested her. She wasn't begging or threatening us; she was stalling."
My father’s eyes widened as the pieces locked into place with terrifying clarity. "She knew the transport route. She had an extraction team waiting along the highway overpass."
The sophisticated betrayal we had just dismantled wasn't just a local financial scam orchestrated by a greedy fiancé and his manipulative mother. It was an entire corporate escape network, deeply embedded within the very legal and judicial systems my father had spent thirty years defending.
"Where would he go?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper as the reality of our vulnerability washed over me. "If his accounts in Zurich are frozen and his assets are seized, he has nothing left here."
"Not true," Marcus corrected grimly, spinning his tablet around to show us a blinking GPS signal overlaid on a satellite map of the coastline. "The transport van's internal tracking beacon just pinged. It's moving again... heading straight toward your family's private airfield in Savannah."
My breath caught in my throat. The Savannah condo wasn't the only property they had targeted; the airfield was where my father kept his private twin-engine plane, and the hangar codes were stored on a secure server in our downtown office—a server that Owen had full administrative access to.
"He's going to steal the plane," my father realized instantly, his professional instincts kicking into overdrive. "Clara, give me your phone. We need to alert airport security and scramble the state police interceptors immediately."
I reached into the pocket of my ruined wedding dress, my fingers searching frantically through the fabric. But my pocket was empty. The backup phone Marcus had given me during the confrontation in the bridal suite was gone.
I looked up at my father, sheer horror gripping my chest. "I dropped it in the bathroom when Owen grabbed my wrists."
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Before my father could speak, the emergency exit door at the end of the hotel corridor clicked open with a soft metallic sound, and a single black smartphone slid across the floor toward our feet, its screen glowing brightly with a new video message from an unknown number.
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