Chapter 7 - The Interrogation Room
Forty-eight hours after the arrests, the sterile, fluorescent-lit corridor of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse felt like a different universe.
I sat in a private conference room accompanied by Marcus, David, and Sarah’s surviving sister, Rebecca Vance-Jenkins, who had flown in from Columbus the moment she heard the news.
Rebecca was thirty-two, with the same warm eyes as the photograph of Sarah David had shown me. When she walked into the room and saw me holding Emma, she didn’t say a word. She simply walked over, knelt by my chair, and took my trembling hand.
“Thank you,” Rebecca whispered, her voice choked with five years of buried grief. “Thank you for not dying, Claire. Thank you for making them pay.”
“We’re going to make sure they never see the sun again, Rebecca,” I promised her.
At that moment, the door opened, and Detective Miller walked in, carrying two thick manila folders. His expression was grim, but there was a fierce satisfaction in his eyes.
“Ryan tried to cut a deal,” the detective said, pulling up a metal folding chair.
Marcus leaned forward. “What did he offer?”
“Everything,” Detective Miller replied. “The second he realized the Ohio State Police were in the building with Sarah’s exhumation order, his spine completely dissolved. He broke during the second hour of questioning. He’s blaming the entire plot on Linda.”
I let out a bitter, humorless laugh. “Of course he is. He’s a coward.”
“He gave us the audio recordings,” the detective continued. “Turns out, Ryan was just as paranoid of his mother as he was of everyone else. He had been secretly recording their phone conversations for two years as ‘insurance’ in case things went south.”
David opened Ryan’s file, reading from the certified interrogation transcript:
*“Ryan Miller: ‘She told me how she did it with Sarah. She told me Sarah was too weak after the baby, that all she had to do was fill the tub with cold water, pull her feet out from under her, and hold her down until the thrashing stopped. Mom told me we had to do the same thing with Claire because Arthur Vance’s trust was airtight. She told me the cold water pitcher was just the start—she wanted Claire hypothermic and delirious so she wouldn’t resist when they staged the slip in the shower the next morning.’”*
The room went deathly cold.
Rebecca covered her mouth, stifling a sob.
The cold water Linda had poured on me wasn’t just a punishment for not cooking dinner. It was the first stage of an execution. If I hadn’t called Marcus... if I hadn’t had the courage to kick them out that very second... I would have been in that shower by morning. Emma would have been motherless, and Ryan would have been sitting in probate court claiming his millions.
“What about Linda?” I asked, my voice deadly quiet. “Has she broken?”
“Linda is currently screaming at her public defender that she’s being persecuted by a deep-state conspiracy,” Detective Miller said. “She refuses to admit anything. But she doesn’t have to. With Ryan’s confession, the encrypted calendar files, the forged life insurance applications, and the Ohio coroner reopening Sarah’s case, both of them are looking at consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.”
“No plea deals,” I said firmly, looking directly into the detective’s eyes. “I don’t care if Ryan gave you his mother on a silver platter. He stood there and smirked while she drenched me. He watched me bleed and laughed. No deals for either of them.”
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Detective Miller nodded with absolute conviction. “The State’s Attorney agrees with you, Claire. There will be no deals. We are taking them to trial on capital charges.”
***
