Chapter 6 - The Broken Alibi
At 9:00 PM that night, while Eric was at the regional FBI field office in Rockford with Clara Alvarez and the private investigator, my home phone rang.
The caller ID displayed: **COUNTY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY – COLLECT CALL.**
I hesitated for three rings, then lifted the receiver. “Yes?”
“An inmate at the Miller County Detention Center is requesting a collect call from: *Vanessa*,” an automated mechanical voice drone announced. “To accept this call, press one.”
I pressed one.
The line clicked. For five seconds, there was only the sound of ragged, wet hyperventilation.
“Karen?” Vanessa gasped. Her voice was unrecognizable. It wasn't the polished, dismissive voice of the woman who had dropped my grandchildren on my porch five days ago. It was the voice of a broken animal. “Karen, please… please don’t hang up. I’m begging you.”
“Why are you calling my house, Vanessa?” I asked, keeping my tone as level and immovable as granite.
“Greg left me,” she sobbed, the sound muffled by what sounded like prison cinderblock echoes. “His phone is disconnected. His attorney, Marcus Kane, came to the jail an hour ago and said Greg dropped his retainer. He’s gone, Karen. He took everything. All the money from the accounts… the money I transferred… it’s gone!”
“You transferred your children’s food and medical money to a con artist, Vanessa,” I said. “What did you think was going to happen?”
“He told me he loved me!” she shrieked hysterically. “He told me Eric didn’t appreciate me! He said we’d have a house in Kensington! He said Eric was holding me back from being who I was born to be! I did it for the kids! I wanted them to have an international education!”
“Do not lie to me, Vanessa,” I snapped, my temper finally cracking like a whip. “You didn’t do it for Brooks, Leo, or Maya. You left Brooks’s baseball trophy at the bottom of a suitcase because you thought it would appease your guilt. You left your children on my porch like bags of trash because you were too cowardly to face your husband when you stabbed him in the back.”
“I’m their mother!” she screamed, dissolving into coughs. “You can’t take them from me! Tell Eric to post my bail! It’s only twenty-five hundred dollars cash! If I stay in here, the other women… they found out I tried to leave the state with the kids, they’re threatening me, Karen! Please! I don’t belong in here!”
“You belong wherever the law puts you,” I told her coldly. “And as for your bail? Eric wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to get you out. That money belongs to the children you tried to kidnap.”
“Karen, please!” she begged, her voice dropping into a desperate whimper. “If you don’t bail me out, the state’s attorney is filing felony custodial interference tomorrow morning. They’re talking about five to ten years in the state penitentiary. I made a mistake! It was just a mistake!”
“A mistake is forgetting to buy milk, Vanessa,” I said. “Forging your husband’s signature, stealing forty-five thousand dollars, and trying to smuggle three American citizens out of their father's life forever is a crime. Sleep on your thin mattress tonight and think about that.”
I slammed the receiver back onto the cradle.
My chest heaved. My hands were shaking so hard I had to grip the edge of the kitchen counter. Across the room, on the small breakfast table, sat a framed picture of Brooks, Leo, and Maya taken at the pumpkin patch last October.
They were laughing, their faces smeared with cider donuts, flanked by their father who was smiling with pure, unguarded pride.
Vanessa had been willing to incinerate that entire world for a con artist in an imported suit.
The front door clicked open. Eric walked in. He looked exhausted to the bone, his tie loosened, his coat hanging over his forearm. But for the first time in five days, the suffocating tension in his jaw had eased.
“The FBI intercepted him,” Eric said quietly, leaning his head against the closed front door.
I looked at him. “Gerald Cole?”
May you like
“They pulled him off the tarmac at Rockford Regional forty minutes ago,” Eric said. A ghost of a grim smile touched his lips. “He had two passports, three hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds, and my children’s social security cards in his briefcase.”
***
