Chapter 13 - The Bailout
The Cook County Women’s Correctional Facility was a brutalist concrete fortress smelling of industrial bleach, sour sweat, and institutional despair. Victoria Vance sat behind the scratched plexiglass partition, her once-immaculate manicure chewed down to the raw quick, her designer silk blouse replaced by a coarse orange jumpsuit that swallowed her gaunt frame.
She looked up with hollow, bloodshot eyes as the guard unlocked Daniel’s side of the visitor booth.
Daniel did not sit down. He stood towering over the counter, his palms flat against the steel ledge, his eyes boring into hers with a hatred so pure it seemed to scorch the air between them.
"You took bail," Daniel said, his voice a low, venomous rasp. "Five hundred thousand dollars in cash, wired from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands at nine this morning. Who posted it, Victoria?"
Victoria gave a cracked, manic laugh that ended in a dry cough. "Hello to you too, Danny. Still playing the righteous widower? How’s my sweet little niece? Is her neck still sore?"
Daniel’s hand slammed against the partition with a violent crack that made the guard at the back wall step forward, resting his hand on his baton. Daniel didn't care.
"Give me a name," Daniel snarled, leaning so close his breath fogged the acrylic glass. "Or so help me God, I will pull every legal string Arthur Vance has left to ensure you are transferred to a maximum-security ward in Dwight before sundown. You think you're getting out? You think you’re walking free?"
Victoria’s smirk dissolved, replaced by a raw, naked terror that Daniel had never seen in her before. Her lips began to tremble, and she looked frantically over Daniel’s shoulder, scanning the empty corridor behind him.
"You don't understand, Daniel," she whispered, her voice cracking as she pressed her face against the partition. "I didn't ask for the bail. I didn't want them to pay it!"
"Who is 'them'?"
"The man with the signet ring!" Victoria sobbed, tears cutting dirty tracks through the grime on her cheeks. "He met me in the hotel bar two weeks before Claire died. He knew everything—my credit card balances, the mortgage on my condo, the loan sharks in Atlantic City. He said Claire had stolen something that belonged to his investors. He told me if I got the key from Emma, I would walk away with five million dollars."
"What’s his name, Victoria?!"
"He called himself Mercer!" she gasped, her fingernails clawing at the plexiglass. "Julian Mercer. But that wasn't his real name. He had a scar running from his left temple down into his collar, and he wore a silver ring with a broken triangle! Daniel... listen to me! When I failed to get the key from the locket, he sent someone to my holding cell. The guard... one of the guards here slid a note into my meal tray this morning."
She fumbled in her jumpsuit pocket, but her hands were shaking so violently she could barely pull out the scrap of crumpled paper. She flattened it against the glass with a trembling palm.
Scrawled in precise, elegant calligraphy were five words:
*You are free to burn.*
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"They aren't bailing me out to save me," Victoria whimpered, her eyes wide with hysterical realization. "They’re bailing me out so they don't have to kill me inside a state facility. The moment I walk through those processing gates at five o'clock... I’m dead, Daniel. And once they finish with me... they’re coming to your house."
***
