Chapter 38 - The Cell Block Confession
The sterile smell of industrial floor wax and stale bleach clung to the visitors' room of the women's correctional facility. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed with a dull, sickening drone that set my teeth on edge.
Across the thick acrylic partition sat Denise Vanderberg.
The woman who had once commanded the high society of three continents, whose wardrobe cost more than the average suburban mortgage, looked utterly unrecognizable. Her immaculate blonde hair had grown out in jagged, unwashed gray streaks. The designer couture had been replaced by a stiff, oversized orange smock, and her manicured hands were raw, chapped, and handcuffed to the stainless steel loop welded into the table.
Yet when she looked up and saw Tyler and me sitting across from her, her lip curled into that same venomous, aristocratic sneer that I had first seen at the barbecue twenty-seven weeks pregnant.
"Come to gloat, little girl?" Denise rasped, her voice rough and hollow from weeks of isolation. "Come to show me pictures of the bastard grandchild that ruined my family?"
"Thomas is alive, Denise," Tyler said coldly, leaning forward until his chest was inches from the glass.
Denise froze.
The sneer vanished instantly. Every drop of color drained from her sallow face, leaving her the color of spoiled milk. Her eyes dilated in pure, primitive terror, darting around the empty concrete room as if expecting the walls themselves to cave in.
"That's... that's impossible," she stammered, her voice shaking violently. "He burned. Julian saw the hull sink. The harbor master confirmed the remains."
"Julian lied to you," I said, leaning in beside Tyler. "Or Thomas bribed the harbor master with the very gold your husband stole from him. He was in our house last night, Denise. He broke into my daughter's nursery. And he left a note."
Tyler pressed the handwritten note against the glass: *Ask her what she did to your mother in 1998.*
Denise gasped, recoiling from the glass as if the paper were dipped in poison. She began shaking her head in frantic, jagged motions, her breath catching in ragged sobs. The arrogant matriarch had dissolved into a terrified child.
"I didn't have a choice!" Denise shrieked, her voice cracking against the acrylic. "Julian was going to leave me! He was going to take the sovereign trust and bring that... that French waitress and her newborn brat back to Zurich! He told me he was going to legitimize Tyler and strip my children of the name!"
"What did you do to my mother?" Tyler demanded, slamming his palm against the glass with a force that made the correctional guard at the door reach for his holster. "Tell me the truth, Denise, or I will have Marcus withdraw our agreement with the prosecutor. You will die in a federal penitentiary with no protection from Thomas's men."
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Denise began to weep—ugly, choking sobs of pure guilt and survival terror. "It wasn't an illness," she whispered, her forehead resting against the glass. "Julian thought she died of pneumonia in the clinic in Lyon. But it was me. I paid the attending physician five hundred thousand francs to alter the saline drip. And Thomas... Thomas was the one who supplied the untraceable digitalis from his contacts in Munich."
She looked up at Tyler, her eyes wild with madness. "Thomas doesn't want the money, Tyler! He never wanted the money! He wants revenge on Julian’s bloodline! He helped me kill your mother so he could hold the murder over my head for twenty-five years... and now that Julian is dead, you are the only one left to pay the debt!"
