Chapter 8 - The Breaking of the Steel
The interrogation room at Columbus Division of Police Headquarters on Marconi Boulevard was deliberately cold.
The air-conditioning had been set to sixty-two degrees, and Derek Vance was sitting in an aluminum swivel chair bolted to the floor, wearing a disposable gray paper jumpsuit. His Carhartt jacket, his stained jeans, and his Red Wing work boots had already been bagged, tagged, and delivered to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation crime lab in London, Ohio.
Across the stainless-steel table sat Detective Ray Vance and Captain Miller.
On the table between them lay three distinct objects: an unsealed evidence bag containing a thirty-six-inch forged steel pry bar with high-velocity lacquer thinner residue on the claw, a digital printout of an optical spectrum analysis from the State Fire Marshal’s mobile laboratory, and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Ethan’s blistered left arm resting on a hospital sheet.
Derek hadn't stopped shaking for four hours.
"I didn't mean for the fire to start," Derek stammered, his eyes darting frantically from the photograph of Ethan to the two-way mirror on the wall. "It was an accident! I told you, I dropped the damn heat gun! The cord got tangled on the stool!"
"Derek," Detective Vance said, leaning forward on his forearms, his voice dangerously calm. "We’re past the heat gun. The State Fire Marshal has already identified the origin. You used an industrial, non-spark-arrested heat gun within four inches of a volatile pool of lacquer thinner. That’s criminal recklessness resulting in catastrophic property damage. That alone gets you eight years at the Pickaway Correctional Institution."
Derek swallowed hard, his throat clicking. "I was trying to help! I heard Ethan scream—"
"Stop," Captain Miller said. She didn't raise her voice, but the cold finality in her tone made Derek flinch as if struck. She slid a second photograph across the table.
It was a still frame from the attic gable camera, magnified and enhanced.
It showed Derek’s face, bathed in the orange glow of the burgeoning fire, his teeth bared in an ugly grimace as he violently shoved the pry bar through the exterior handles of the workshop doors. Ethan’s small face was visible through the high transom glass, terrified, beaten down by smoke.
"That’s you, Derek," Miller said. "At 12:43:12. The fire was already four feet high. The temperature at the ceiling was rising past four hundred degrees. You closed both doors. You took that steel bar—the one with your palm prints etched into the grease on the shank—and you jammed it across the frame. You barred the doors from the outside. You locked an eight-year-old boy in a chemical furnace."
Derek’s breath hitchhiked in his chest. "I... I was trying to keep the fire contained! I was trying to stop the air from feeding it!"
"You're a carpenter, Derek," Vance countered ruthlessly. "You know wood framing. You know that workshop had open soffit vents and four high transom louver windows. Shutting the double doors didn't starve the fire of oxygen; it turned the building into a pressurized thermal convection chamber. Within ninety seconds, the flashover point would have hit nine hundred degrees. If Vanessa hadn't pulled that bar off the handles, Ethan wouldn't have survived another two minutes. His lungs would have seared shut on the third breath."
Derek pressed his palms against his eyes, his paper jumpsuit rustling loudly. "I panicked! I panicked, man! You don't know what it’s like! The flames just went *whoosh*! I didn't know what I was doing!"
"You knew what you were doing when you broke Martha Harper’s collarbone," Vance said, slapping a medical report down onto the steel table. "Martha Harper, seventy-two years old. You hit her so hard against the door casing her left clavicle snapped in two places. She has an acute subdural hematoma. She identified you five minutes after she woke up in the trauma ward."
"She was in my way!" Derek shouted, his control finally fracturing. "She wouldn't give me the key! Marcus owed me that money! That was my shop! Marcus stole my inheritance!"
"Marcus didn't steal a nickel from you, Derek," Vance said, pulling a blue-bound folder from his briefcase. "This is the forensic audit of Vance Architecture & Design LLC, conducted by the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Financial Crimes Unit. Over eighteen months, you forged Marcus’s endorsement on twelve corporate payroll checks totaling twenty-four thousand six hundred dollars."
Derek’s head snapped up, his jaw slack.
"Marcus found out three weeks before he was killed," Vance continued, turning the pages slowly, each paper rasping against the steel like a razor blade. "He didn't go to the cops because he wanted to give you a chance to pay it back. He had a promissory note drawn up. But you didn't want to pay it back, did you? You knew Marcus kept the original signed promissory note, along with the forged bank drafts, in the floor safe under his workbench."
Derek sank back into his chair, the paper jumpsuit pulling tight across his slumped shoulders. All the bluster, all the arrogant, entitled aggression that had terrorized Vanessa for twenty-one months, was collapsing like a burned-out rafter.
"Ma told me it was there," Derek whimpered, his voice shrinking into that of a terrified, petulant child. "Ma said... she said Marcus left the original papers in the shop safe. She said if Vanessa went to probate with those files, they'd take my truck. They'd take my house in Grove City to satisfy the corporate debt. Ma said Marcus wouldn't have wanted that. She said we had to get the papers out before the estate closed."
Captain Miller leaned in, her eyes locked on Derek’s sweating face. "Did Lorraine tell you to go there today?"
Derek hesitated, his eyes darting toward the mirror. "She... she knew I was going."
"Did she tell you to take the boy?"
"No! Ethan was just there!" Derek sobbed, tears cutting pale trails through the soot still embedded in the creases of his neck. "I thought the house was empty! I thought Martha had taken him to the park! When I saw the kid inside, I just... I needed the combination to the floor safe! I thought he knew it! Marcus always showed him everything!"
"And when the fire started?" Captain Miller asked. "What did Lorraine tell you on the lawn?"
Derek buried his face in his hands, his shoulders heaving with ragged, ugly sobs.
"She said to let it burn," Derek whispered.
The audio recording system in the ceiling hummed softly, capturing every word.
"Say that again, Derek," Detective Vance said, leaning over the table. "For the record."
"She said... she said if the shop burned to the ground, the safe would melt, or the heat would destroy the papers inside," Derek cried, his voice breaking into a ragged, pathetic wail. "She said nobody would look twice at an accidental shed fire. She told me to say Ethan was playing with matches. She said Pendelton would take Ethan away from Vanessa, and Vanessa would be too broken to fight us in probate. She planned it! As soon as she saw the smoke, she told me what to say! It was her idea to blame Ethan! Not mine! Don't let them pin murder on me! Please! It was her!"
Detective Vance stood up from the table. He gathered the evidence folders, the laboratory reports, and the photographs, sliding them back into his leather briefcase with calm, deliberate efficiency.
"Derek Vance," Detective Vance said, looking down at the trembling man with undisguised revulsion. "You are being formally charged with Aggravated Arson, Attempted Aggravated Murder, Felonious Assault, Aggravated Burglary, and Tampering with Evidence. Because of your statements regarding Lorraine Vance, the prosecutor is also adding a charge of Conspiracy to Commit Homicide."
He turned toward the heavy steel door, knocking twice for the guard to unlock it.
May you like
"You're going to the Franklin County Corrections Center on Jackson Pike," Vance added, pausing at the threshold. "And Derek? Don't bother calling your mother for bail. She’s being booked into the third-floor processing tank right behind you."
***
