Chapter 8 - The Confrontation at Dawn
The mist was rising off the Virginia hills like smoke from a dying fire when the black government Suburbans rolled back up the circular driveway.
It was five-thirty in the morning.
The sky was the color of bruised slate, cold and merciless, the maple leaves plastered to the asphalt by the freezing autumn drizzle.
The heavy front doors of the Whitman estate opened.
Two State Police troopers led Liam through the threshold.
He wasn't wearing his Tom Ford dinner jacket anymore. He was wearing a cheap gray sweatshirt he had apparently bought at a twenty-four-hour gas station, his hair matted against his forehead, his wrists locked behind his back in heavy stainless steel cuffs.
Behind him walked Eleanor.
She looked as if she had aged twenty years in eight hours.
Her navy silk dress was ruined, dragging through the wet grass as she stumbled into the foyer, her eyes wild, her face pale as parchment.
“Haley!” Eleanor screamed the moment she saw me standing at the base of the grand staircase. “Call them off! Tell these men who Liam is! They dragged him out of the motel room like a common criminal! They wouldn't even let him put on his shoes!”
I didn't answer.
I stood on the first marble riser, my Class A uniform immaculate, my hands clasped behind my back.
Beside me stood Commonwealth’s Attorney Cross, holding the folder of bank manifests, and Arthur Vance, who had returned to the house an hour ago after Cross’s investigators contacted his firm’s compliance directors.
Arthur looked Liam up and down with the clinical detachment of a butcher inspecting a diseased carcass.
“Hello, Liam,” Arthur said quietly.
May you like
Liam flinched, trying to shrink behind the state trooper holding his right arm. “Arthur… please… this is a misunderstanding. Haley is framing me. She’s using her military friends to manufacture evidence!”
“Is she?” Arthur Vance pulled
