Chapter 7 - The Visitor's Bag
The fluorescent lights of the county jail visiting room buzzed with a relentless, maddening frequency. Maya sat across the thick plexiglass barrier, watching as Sarah Carson was escorted into the booth by a corrections officer. Sarah looked remarkably calm, her designer coat draped over her arm, carrying a heavy canvas duffel bag that had somehow slipped past initial intake screening due to a paperwork mix-up.
Tyler sat on the other side of the inmate glass, his orange jumpsuit hanging loosely from his shoulders, looking hollow and defeated. Sarah sat down opposite him, sliding the heavy duffel bag onto the narrow metal shelf beneath the pass-through slot.
"You shouldn't have come here, Sarah," Tyler whispered through the perforated metal speaker. "The feds are watching every move we make."
"They were watching," Sarah corrected him smoothly, a cold, calculated glint in her eyes that Tyler had never noticed in all their years of marriage. "Past tense, Tyler. Because by the time they figure out what’s in this bag, we won't be under their jurisdiction anymore."
Maya, observing from the adjacent monitoring room through a one-way mirror, pressed her ear against the acoustic glass alongside Detective Miller.
"What is she doing?" Drew muttered, standing behind them with his hands clenched into tight fists. "She’s smuggling something in right under their noses."
Inside the booth, Sarah unzipped the duffel bag just enough for Tyler to see the neatly stacked bricks of high-denomination bearer bonds and a secondary passport bearing a completely different identity and photograph.
"Where did you get this?" Tyler breathed, his eyes widening in pure terror. "Mom said she hid everything in the trust!"
"Your mother didn't hide anything, Tyler. She was a distraction," Sarah said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Helen played the patsy while I liquidated the remaining corporate assets and transferred them into offshore crypto-wallets. The money you stole for your house was just a drop in the bucket compared to what I’ve been moving for the last five years."
Tyler slumped back against the plastic chair, the full weight of his wife’s betrayal crashing down on him. "You used me. You used my mother to take the fall."
"I used everyone," Sarah replied without a shred of remorse, zipping the bag back up. "And now, I’m going to use this door to walk right out of here."
Detective Miller cursed under his breath, drawing his sidearm from its holster and spinning toward the door. "Guards! Secure visiting room four! Stop that woman immediately!"
May you like
As the heavy metal doors of the monitoring room flew open, a deafening alarm blared through the facility, and the lights in the visiting room instantly plunged into pitch blackness.
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