Chapter 16 - The Interrogation in Cellblock 4

At 10:00 a.m. the following Tuesday, inside the subterranean maximum-security interview suite of the Federal Detention Center in downtown San Diego, sixty-eight-year-old Richard Vance sat handcuffed to a stainless-steel table.

He wore a drab, oversized orange corrections jumpsuit, having lost fifteen pounds over five days of pretrial detention.

His hair was unwashed, uncombed, and wild, his skin sallow and gray under the buzzing fluorescent tubes, his hands shaking in constant, rhythmic tremors. Stripped of his tailored vicuña coats, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his stolen millions, and his manufactured European arrogance, he looked like a broken, hollow shell of a man.

The heavy steel security door buzzed and clicked open.

Stepping into the room, dressed in an immaculate bespoke three-piece charcoal Italian wool suit, his six-foot-two frame casting a dark, terrifying shadow across the room, was Leo Vance.

Beside Leo walked eighty-year-old Arthur Vance Senior, his silver-headed walking cane striking the concrete floor with chilling finality:

CLACK. CLACK.

Richard looked up, his bloodshot eyes widening with desperate, pathetic hope as he leaned across the cold steel table.

"Leo...?! Arthur, thank God!" Richard choked out, his voice cracking into raw, sniveling whimpers. "Did you talk to the United States Attorney?! Did Agnes tell you about the European settlement?! I will sign over all our private real estate in Zurich! I’ll surrender the accounts in Geneva! You have to get me out of here, Leo! The inmates in this block... they know what we tried to do to your company! I can't survive in this cage!"

Leo didn't sit down.

He stood towering over the table, his dark eyes colder than an Arctic blizzard, looking down at the uncle who had spent twenty years manipulating his family’s greed.

"You called my wife a parasite, Richard," Leo said softly, every word sharp as surgical diamond. "You arrived at my estate with armed process servers while my two-month-old daughter was sleeping in her nursery. You told me that my family had the right to seize her home."

"I was protecting the lineage, Leo!" Richard sobbed, tears and snot dripping freely onto the stainless steel. "Our grandfather built that trust! Our family traded across the globe for fifty years! You can't let a girl who cleans dishes tear down our bloodline!"

Arthur Vance Senior stepped forward, sliding a single legal document across the table.

"Richard Vance," Arthur spoke, his deep baritone rolling off the cinderblock walls like an executioner’s drumbeat. "Under the Universal Lineal Disinheritance and Civil Asset Forfeiture Decree signed yesterday by Chief Judge Eleanor Bradley, your name has been permanently excised from every corporate, civic, and maritime registry in the state of California and the Swiss Confederation."

Arthur pointed to the document.

"You have zero claim to the shipping lines. You have zero claim to the offshore funds. You leave this city with precisely zero dollars, zero assets, and sixty-two million dollars in non-dischargeable federal restitution debt."

Richard stared at the paper, his hands trembling so violently that the steel handcuffs rattled against the anchor ring.

"And Clara...?" Richard whispered, his voice barely audible. "Does the girl know who she is?"

Leo looked down at him for the last time in his life.

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"Clara knows exactly who she is, Richard," Leo said quietly, turning toward the heavy steel door. "She is my wife. She is the mother of my child. And she owns every single brick your shadow cartel ever touched."

The steel door opened with a heavy magnetic clunk, and Leo and Arthur walked out into the corridor, leaving Richard’s broken wails to echo uselessly against the concrete walls.