CHAPTER 12 — THIRTY SECONDS
Detective Hale ordered everyone out.
We ran through the ballroom as the timer dropped below twenty seconds.
Margaret stumbled.
I wrapped one arm around her waist.
Laura supported her from the other side.
Vanessa was behind us.
At the front steps, I heard her scream.
A section of ceiling had collapsed between us.
“Vanessa!”
“I’m okay!” she shouted through the smoke. “Go!”
I turned back.
Margaret grabbed my arm.
“You can’t.”
“She’s my sister.”
For ten years, Vanessa had allowed me to believe I was unwanted.
She had slapped me beside our mother’s casket.
She had stood silent while Richard destroyed our family.
But she had also saved Margaret from the study.
She had helped create the evidence that brought us here.
I ran back inside.
Vanessa was trapped beneath a wooden beam.
The timer reached nine seconds.
I pulled.
The beam did not move.
Seven seconds.
Vanessa looked at me.
“Leave me.”
“No.”
Five seconds.
An officer rushed in and helped lift the beam.
We dragged Vanessa through the front doors as the first explosion ripped through the east wing.
The force threw us across the lawn.
Windows shattered.
Flames rose through the roof.
For several seconds, I could hear nothing.
Then Vanessa began laughing.
Not because it was funny.
Because we were alive.
Detective Hale received word that Richard’s boat had been found drifting near the northern marsh.
There was blood on the controls.
But no body.
A helicopter searched the island.
Coast Guard units sealed the shoreline.
At sunrise, an officer discovered Richard’s footprints leading from the water toward an abandoned hunting cabin.
Inside, they found his bloody jacket, the gun, and a satellite phone.
One call had been placed minutes before the explosion.
The number belonged to the Savannah district attorney.
The same man preparing Richard’s prosecution.
Hale’s expression darkened.
“This is bigger than Richard.”
The district attorney disappeared before officers reached his home.
His office computer had been wiped.
But one document remained in the printer queue.
It listed judges, police officers, bankers, doctors, and business executives who had received payments from Vale Maritime Holdings.
Richard had built a network that protected him for decades.
At the bottom of the list was one final name.
Samuel Whitaker.
I stared at it.
Mr. Whitaker had helped my mother.
He had been shot because of Richard.
But according to the payment ledger, he had also accepted more than two million dollars.
When I confronted him, he did not deny it.
“I took Richard’s money,” he said.
“Why?”
“To build the case that could finally destroy him.”
“Or to protect yourself?”
Mr. Whitaker looked at me with exhausted eyes.
“Both.”
Then he handed me a sealed court document.
It showed that Richard had filed an emergency petition hours before escaping.
The petition challenged my mother’s mental capacity and froze the entire inheritance.
But the final page contained something worse.
May you like
Richard had named Vanessa as his cooperating witness.
Her signed statement accused me of kidnapping Margaret and murdering the woman originally intended for the casket.
