Chapter 28 - Sins in the Snow
The helicopter, trailing black smoke and spinning uncontrollably on its vertical axis, tilted sharply over the tree line. Its main rotors clipped the towering crown of a two-hundred-year-old oak with an ear-splitting screech of tearing metal.
The machine flipped upside down, tumbling over the ridge into the ravine behind the estate, detonating in a massive, muffled fireball that lit the low-hanging blizzard clouds in a ghastly orange glow.
Silence rushed back in, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the whistling wind and the sound of Nathan’s ragged breathing.
Nathan stepped out of the tree line, the rifle lowered, his boots crunching methodically across the ice-crusted snow.
Fifty yards ahead, crawling on his hands and knees toward the edge of the frozen lake, was Arthur Vance. The lawyer’s glasses were gone, his face covered in blood and frostbite, his expensive coat shredded. He was clawing frantically across the glazed ice, his fingers reaching toward the aluminum flight case that had come to rest ten feet from the dark, open water where the current kept the ice thin.
"Stop crawling, Arthur," Nathan said.
Arthur froze. He slowly turned over onto his back, his breath coming in wheezing, bloody gasps. He looked up at Nathan standing over him against the graying dawn sky, the barrel of the rifle pointed directly at his chest.
"You can't... shoot me, Nathan," Arthur gasped, shivering so violently his teeth clicked like castanets. "You don't have the stomach for it. You’re Harold’s son... but you’re not Harold."
"You’re right," Nathan said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "My father was a coward who hid behind lawyers like you to destroy families from thirty thousand feet."
Arthur let out a wet, rattling laugh. "You still think... you still think Vanessa’s family was the only one? Look inside that case, Nathan. Open it."
Nathan didn't move the rifle. "I don't need to open it. Michael has already contacted the federal prosecutor’s office in Chicago."
"The federal prosecutors?" Arthur sneered, spitting dark bile onto the ice. "Who do you think authorized Harold’s initial contracts twenty years ago? Who do you think signed off on Sarah’s disappearance from that clinic? The government didn't look away, Nathan. They partnered with him. Eli isn't just an heir to Caldwell Industries. Eli is the key to an offshore slush fund that financed three consecutive Senate campaigns."
Arthur reached into his coat pocket with a trembling, blackened hand.
"Don't do it, Arthur," Nathan warned, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Arthur didn't pull a gun. He pulled a silver, vintage lighter—Harold Caldwell’s personal lighter, engraved with the family crest.
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"If I go down, Nathan, the whole house burns with me," Arthur whispered. "I rigged the primary storage tanks at the pumping station. The entire north wing of the estate is sitting on fifty thousand gallons of pressurized propane. The moment my heartbeat stops... the transmitter in my watch trips the relay."
***
