Chapter 14 - The Ashes of Three Years
The sirens outside Vance Tower were a deafening chorus of red lights reflecting off the wet glass skyscrapers of downtown Seattle.
I sat on the tailboard of a Seattle Fire Department paramedic rig with an oxygen mask strapped over my face, coughing out the last of the smoke while holding the three scorched red binders tightly in my lap.
Ten feet away, police officers were shoving the man in the grey raincoat—identified by Detective Miller as a disbarred private investigator named Vance Mercer—into the back of a squad car.
Ricardo walked over to the ambulance, a foil thermal blanket draped over his shoulders and fresh soot streaking his bandage.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, pulling the oxygen mask down gently from my face when I shook my head. His hands were trembling as he looked at my blistered fingers. "You ran into a burning room for my files, Elena."
"Not for your files," I rasped, my throat raw from the smoke. "For Vianey's."
I looked down at the third binder—the oldest one, which had been hidden at the very bottom of the floor safe beneath the corporate ledgers.
My heart ached as I looked up into Ricardo’s exhausted, dark eyes. This man had spent the last three years believing he had failed his wife because she had driven down a mountain road in the rain after an argument with him. That guilt was the chain Adrian had used to control him, to make him retreat from his business, even to make him keep his distance from Vianey when she looked too much like her mother.
"Ricardo," I said softly, nodding for Mara to give us a moment of privacy. "Why was this third binder in your personal safe if Adrian was the one who set up the biometric lock after Clara died?"
Ricardo frowned. "Adrian had the safe installed during the office remodel three years ago. He kept the duplicate keys for estate insurance records. Why?"
Hands shaking, I opened the scorched leather cover and handed him the water-stained page from Keller Forensic Automotive.
"What is this?" Ricardo whispered, tilting the page toward the streetlamp.
"It's an independent salvage inspection ordered by your insurance carrier forty-eight hours after Clara's accident on Snoqualmie Pass," I said gently. "Look at the summary findings in paragraph three."
Ricardo’s eyes moved across the page. Slowly, the color drained from his soot-streaked face until he looked like a statue carved from marble.
"Master brake cylinder fluid line exhibits clean mechanical shearing consistent with deliberate cutting prior to departure. Not consistent with rock-slide impact."
"And look at why the report never reached the State Patrol or your desk," I whispered, pointing to the bottom margin. "Adrian intercepted the insurance adjuster, paid out the policy settlement privately through the family foundation, and had the vehicle crushed at a scrap yard in Tacoma the next morning—one week after you told him you were cutting off his gambling debts in Macau and naming Clara sole executor of Vianey's trust."
Ricardo couldn't breathe. He dropped to his knees on the wet pavement right in front of the ambulance, clutching the charred paper against his chest as a raw, agonizing sound tore from the back of his throat.
Three years of self-hatred, three years of letting his brother live under his roof, eat at his table, and touch his daughter's head—all built on a murder.
I slid off the bumper of the ambulance and knelt in the puddle beside him, wrapping my arms around his trembling shoulders just as I had held Vianey in the treehouse.
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Then Detective Miller came running toward us from the command post, his phone pressed to his ear.
"Mr. Vance! Elena!" Miller shouted over the roar of the fire engine pumps. "The prosecutor at the Downtown Precinct just called! Before we could transfer Celeste to the county jail, her brother's lawyer posted a five-hundred-thousand-dollar cash bond on the trespass and conspiracy charges—and she walked out of the precinct twenty minutes ago!"
