Chapter 11 - The Dead Matriarch
The video kept playing, but the world around me seemed to freeze solid.
"Who ordered the succinylcholine?" the woman behind the camera demanded.
"You did, Mrs. Bennett," Vance wept, shaking with terror. "You told me to supply it to Grant. You said Grant didn't have the stomach to finish Claire himself, so we had to force his hand by setting up the Pierce family."
The camera panned slightly, catching a reflection in the boardroom window.
A woman with silver-streaked hair, wearing a bespoke charcoal suit, held the recording phone. Her face was unmistakable.
Victoria Bennett. My mother.
"And the insurance policy?" Victoria asked calmly.
"Grant thinks he's the beneficiary," Vance sobbed. "He doesn't know you updated the Bennett Holdings corporate charter before you faked the crash in Geneva. If Claire dies, the ninety million doesn't go to Grant. It reverts to the offshore entity in the Cayman Islands... *The Alpine Trust*."
"Which belongs to me," Victoria’s voice finished smoothly. "Thank you, Vance. You've been adequately compensated."
The video cut to black.
I sat on the dirt floor of the boat shed, the tablet humming on my lap, unable to draw air into my lungs.
My mother was alive.
She hadn't died in the Alps. She had staged her own death to escape federal embezzlement charges six years ago, leaving my father to take the fall and die of a broken heart.
And now, she had returned from the shadows, using Grant as an expendable pawn to harvest a ninety-million-dollar insurance settlement off my corpse.
Grant wasn't the mastermind. Grant was an arrogant, desperate idiot who thought he was running the board, completely blind to the fact that our mother was pulling his strings from the dark.
A sharp ringtone broke the silence.
It was Detective Miller’s spare police radio, sitting on the crate beside Maisie.
The red light was flashing.
A voice crackled through the static:
*"Unit 4, this is Central Dispatch. We have an officer-down signal originating from the Grand Plaza sub-basement. Paramedics have secured Detective Miller. He is conscious and requesting an immediate patch to frequency nine."*
I snatched the radio and thumbed the transmit button. "Miller? Are you alive?"
Static hissed. Then, Miller’s raspy, pained voice came through the speaker:
*"Claire... listen to me. Grant didn't leave the hotel alone. After you hit him with the car... someone picked him up."*
"Who?" I demanded, though I already knew the sickening answer.
*"A black Rolls-Royce with diplomatic plates,"* Miller whispered, his breathing shallow. *"The registration came back to a Swiss holding company. Claire... they found Chloe Pierce."*
"Where is she?"
*"She’s alive,"* Miller said. *"She was locked in a storage locker at the marina. She told my deputies the whole thing. Your mother is at the Bennett family estate in Cape May. She has Caroline. And Claire... she just sent a team of private contractors to your husband's old law office."*
"Why my husband's office?"
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*"Because that’s where the physical paper stock for the Alpine Trust is stored,"* Miller warned. *"If she burns those original certificates, there’s no paper trail linking her to the offshore accounts. She takes the ninety million and disappears forever. You have to get there before they torch the building."*
***
