Chapter 12 - Whispers in the Concrete
The visitor’s booth at Stateville Correctional smelled of industrial floor stripper, cold metal, and despair.
It was a world away from the pristine, sunlit towers of Lake Shore Drive. Here, the fluorescent bulbs hummed like dying bees, flickering intermittently against the peeling green paint of the reinforced glass partitions.
I sat on the bolted steel stool, Julian standing silently behind my left shoulder like an immovable sentinel. His presence was my anchor; without him, the sheer weight of my fury might have shattered the glass before the guards even brought the prisoner in.
A heavy iron door clanged open at the back of the chamber.
Thomas Bennett stepped through, accompanied by two armed guards.
The man who had once worn three-thousand-dollar bespoke suits and sneered at my humble roots looked hollowed out, like an abandoned house whose roof had caved in. His designer hair had been shorn to a rough, uneven buzz cut. The sharp, arrogant jawline was gaunt, bruised along the cheekbone, and stubbled with salt-and-pepper scruff. The bright orange jumpsuit hung loosely from his narrow frame.
He didn’t look up until he reached the stool. When his sunken eyes met mine, he stopped dead in his tracks. A physical shudder ran through his body.
He picked up the heavy plastic receiver with hands that bore raw, untreated knuckles.
I lifted my receiver, pressing it against my ear.
"Clara," he rasped. His voice sounded like gravel grinding in a rusted mill. "I told my attorney... I didn't want any visitors. Especially not you."
"You don't get a choice, Thomas," I said coldly. "You never did when it came to me."
"Are you here to gloat?" He tried to summon a remnant of his old, mocking smirk, but his lips quivered. "I saw the papers in the prison library. The Chloe Bennett Pavilion. Very touching. You took every dime my family ever hoarded and plastered our dead daughter's name over a public hospital."
"Do not speak her name with that filthy mouth," I commanded, leaning close to the reinforced glass.
My voice was so low and lethal that Thomas flinched, pulling back an inch.
"I didn't come to talk about the foundation, Thomas," I said, pulling the folded photocopy from my jacket pocket and pressing it flat against the thick glass, right at eye level.
The moment Thomas's eyes landed on the words *Pegasus Seven* and the signature of *Dr. Adrian Vance*, every drop of blood abandoned his face. He began to shake so violently the plastic telephone receiver rattled against his ear.
"Where... where did you get that?" he stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward the guards at the door, terror dripping from every pore. "Clara, burn that. Burn it right now! You don't know what you're doing!"
"Who was the heart for, Thomas?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm. "Who did you sell Chloe’s heart to?"
"I didn't sell anything!" he choked, tears suddenly spilling from his bloodshot eyes. "I didn't have a choice!"
"You had a choice to be her father!" I slammed my open palm against the glass. The resounding crack echoed through the visitor's hall, making the nearest guard look over with a hand on his holster. Julian placed a firm, grounding hand on my shoulder, keeping me tethered.
"Tell me," I whispered through the receiver. "Or so help me God, Julian will file a motion to reopen your discovery on international human trafficking and organ trade charges. You think five years in minimum security is bad? They will transfer you to ADX Florence for the rest of your miserable life."
Thomas broke. He lowered his head, resting his forehead against the cold, smudged glass, sobbing like a terrified child.
"It was Vance Sterling's grandson," Thomas wept, the receiver muffling his pathetic confession. "The boy had a congenital defect. He was dying. Vance approached my father and me six months before Chloe even went into heart failure. They were tracking the national registry. They knew Chloe was a rare universal pediatric match."
The air left my lungs in an agonizing rush. *They were tracking her.*
"When Chloe collapsed," Thomas continued, shivering uncontrollably, "Vance called me. He said my father's offshore hedge fund was under SEC investigation. He said if I signed the medical refusal form—claiming Chloe was too unstable to survive the transplant—he would make the SEC investigation vanish and deposit ten million dollars into the Pegasus Seven account."
"And what did Ximena have to do with it?" Julian spoke into the auxiliary mic beside me, his legal mind analyzing every confession.
"Ximena was Vance’s executive liaison," Thomas whispered, looking up at us with raw, pathetic self-pity. "She wasn't just a mistress, Julian. She was planted in my office to make sure I followed through. She kept me drugged and distracted at the penthouse while the flight to Zurich took off."
I looked at the shell of a man before me. The man I had once loved, the man who had pledged before God to protect our family, had traded our daughter’s life to cover his family's white-collar crimes.
"Where are the transfer logs kept, Thomas?" I asked.
"Vance has them in the private vault at Sterling Biomedical’s headquarters in downtown Chicago," Thomas whimpered. "Clara, please... stop digging. Vance owns judges, senators, governors. If he finds out you have these papers, you won't live to see the autumn."
I hung up the phone.
May you like
Thomas kept babbling, his mouth moving against the plastic receiver, begging, pleading, tapping against the glass.
I didn't look back once as Julian and I walked through the iron security gates, back out into the Chicago breeze that suddenly felt as hot as hellfire.
