Chapter 3 - The Wire and the Enamel
Sarah Klein had an office on Court Street in Brooklyn that didn't look like an attorney’s office; it looked like an antiquarian bookshop that had been occupied by a very organized squatter.
There were no brass scales. There were no framed diplomas from Columbia or Harvard, though she had degrees from both. There were only four steel flat-file cabinets, three monitors running on an articulated arm, and a French press that had not been cleaned since the Obama administration.
Sarah didn't look at my head. She looked at the three pieces of wire in the clear plastic evidence container that Dr. Arispe had signed.
She had a jeweler’s loupe screwed into her left eye socket.
“Tractor Supply,” she said.
I sat on the opposite side of the desk, my hands flat on my knees. “You can tell that from the barb?”
“I can tell that from the twist ratio,” Sarah said. She picked up the plastic box with tweezers. “Two-point cattle wire. Twelve-and-a-half gauge. High-tensile steel with a class-one zinc coating. If you buy it in Westchester, you buy it at the Tractor Supply on Route 202 in Cortlandt Manor, or you buy it at the feed mill in Brewster. But look at the cut.”
She turned the container toward the light.
“This wasn't done with a hand tool. A hand tool leaves a bevel on both sides of the pinch. See how flat this face is? That’s an abrasive cut-off wheel. A high-speed bench grinder or a Dremel with a fiberglass-reinforced disc.”
“Who owns a Dremel?” Bellamy asked.
“Beckett,” I said.
Sarah dropped the loupe into her palm. “The brother?”
“Beckett builds architectural scale models,” I said. “He has a four-hundred-square-foot workshop in the carriage house behind the main house in Rye. He has three different rotary tools, two miniature table saws, and forty different varieties of wire for making bridge suspenders and structural trusses.”
“Beckett wouldn't do this,” Bellamy said. “Beckett was the one who looked like he was going to vomit when Delaney did the toast.”
“Beckett wouldn't do it to hurt me,” I said. “Beckett would do it because Delaney told him she needed ‘structural armatures’ for a floral installation, and he didn't ask what she was mounting them on.”
Sarah Klein picked up a legal pad. Her pen was an old-fashioned fountain pen with green ink—the only color, she claimed, that didn't make her want to gouge her own eyes out after twelve hours of discovery review.
“Let’s talk about the production company,” Sarah said. “Lumen Life LLC.”
“What about it?”
“It’s not Delaney,” Sarah said. She swiveled one of the three screens toward us.
A corporate tree appeared. It looked like an octopus that had been through a paper shredder: Delaware holding companies feeding into Nevada limited liability corporations, which in turn held sixty-five percent of a Cayman partnership called *Selah Media Investments*.
“Delaney is the face,” Sarah said. “She’s the talent. But the managing member of Lumen Life LLC is Hayes’s brother, Preston Vance.”
I stopped. “Vance?”
“Preston Vance,” Sarah repeated. “Does that name ring any church bells in your clinical soul, Sloan?”
“My clinical director is Marcus Vance.”
Sarah smiled. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of a tax auditor who had just found an unrecorded bank account in Zurich.
“Marcus Vance is Preston Vance’s uncle,” Sarah said. “The Vance family owns six commercial behavioral health clinics between White Plains and Danbury. They specialize in ‘reputational recovery’ and adolescent transition programs. They take rich kids from Scarsdale who have been caught with ketamine or who have tried to run away from their boarding schools, and they put them into eighteen-month ‘therapeutic maintenance’ tracks that bill out at twelve hundred dollars a day.”
“June,” I whispered.
The pieces didn't fall into place; they collided.
“June turns eighteen in three weeks,” I said. “On her eighteenth birthday, the trust established by Clara’s estate dissolves its initial restriction. The Rye house—which is currently valued at four point two million dollars—reverts either to June outright, or, if she is deemed ‘medically or psychologically incapacitated,’ to her legal conservator.”
“And who is her legal conservator currently nominated under the trust rider?” Sarah asked.
“Thatcher,” I said. “With Delaney as the successor.”
“And who,” Sarah continued, her green pen scratching across the pad with a small, rhythmic hiss, “was scheduled to perform June’s independent psychological capacity evaluation next Tuesday morning at nine o'clock?”
“Marcus Vance,” I said.
The silence in the room was heavy. Outside, a delivery truck downshifted on Court Street, the diesel engine shuddering against the windowpanes.
“They didn't just want you out of the wedding,” Sarah said. “They wanted you out of the professional register. Because if you’re under an administrative suspension for violent conduct, you can't file an emergency petition under Article 81 of the Mental Hygiene Law to be appointed June’s guardian ad litem.”
“They spent three weeks setting it up,” Bellamy said. Her face had gone very pale. “The rehearsal take. The pre-rendered video. The agricultural wire. They knew Sloan would react. Sloan has spent thirty-four years protecting June from Laurel’s machinery.”
“They didn't expect the blood,” I said.
Sarah looked up from her pad. “What?”
“Delaney,” I said. “I watched her face when my fingers came back red. She didn't expect the scalp to bleed like that. She thought the tines would catch in my hair, pull some roots out, make me look wild and defensive on camera when I knocked the thing off. But she didn't know about the temporal arteries. She’s an influencer; she doesn't know anatomy. She thought she was staging a catfight for the mid-season finale.”
“A felony assault,” Sarah said, “is a very clumsy way to stage a mid-season finale.”
“Not if the victim signs an NDA,” I said. “Not if the family pays seventy-five thousand dollars out of an umbrella account and the sister disappears into private practice disgrace.”
Sarah Klein capped her fountain pen. The brass cap clicked home with the finality of a deadbolt.
“We have two hours before the Westchester County Surrogate’s office closes for the weekend,” she said.
“What are we filing?” Bellamy asked.
“We’re not filing a lawsuit,” Sarah said. She stood up, reached behind her chair, and pulled a navy wool blazer off a wooden hanger. “A lawsuit is slow. A lawsuit gives Thatcher time to call his friends at the country club. We’re filing an ex parte application for an order to show cause with a temporary restraining order.”
“Against Delaney?”
“Against Delaney, against Hayes, against Thatcher, and against the Hudson Valley Counseling Collaborative,” Sarah said. She slid her arms into the blazer, her movements spare and efficient. “We’re freezing the assets of Lumen Life LLC before they can execute the licensing deal with the streamer. And then we’re going to Rye to pick up your niece.”
“June won't leave without Beckett,” I said.
May you like
“Then,” Sarah said, picking up her briefcase, “we’re going to have to make your brother Beckett decide whether he’s an architect or a prop department.”
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