Chapter 7 - The Interrogation Room
The federal detention center was cold, sterile, and smelled of industrial disinfectant. Abigail sat across from Samuel and Arthur in a small, windowless interrogation room. She was wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit, her hair unwashed, her face pale and drawn. The arrogance she had possessed a week ago was completely shattered.
"Sam... please," Abigail whispered, reaching across the metal table, but the guard behind her cleared his throat, warning her to keep her hands to herself. "You have to drop the charges. I'm pregnant, Sam. We're going to have a baby."
Samuel didn't blink. He sat perfectly still, his hands folded on the table. "You're not pregnant, Abigail. The medical staff at the jail executed a mandatory intake screening three days ago. Your medical records were forwarded to my legal team. Stop lying. The lies don't work anymore."
Abigail dropped her head, a bitter, ugly scoff escaping her lips. "You think you're so smart, don't you? You and that old woman. You think you’ve won."
Arthur Vance Senior stepped forward, throwing a thick stack of corporate registry documents onto the metal table. The thud echoed like a gunshot.
"We don't think we've won, Abigail. We know we have," Arthur said smoothly. "Yesterday morning, federal agents executed a search warrant at your mother Eleanor’s residence in Palm Beach. We found the secondary encrypted server. We found the original ledgers from the Victor Williams fraud, and we found the authorization keys for the dormant Williams-Vance commercial account."
Abigail’s eyes darted toward the documents, her breathing becoming shallow. "That... that has nothing to do with me. That’s my mother’s business."
"Your mother already signed a cooperation agreement, Abigail," Samuel said, his voice flat and unyielding. "She realized she was facing twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary for historical racketeering. She traded you to save herself. She gave us the bank routing numbers, the passwords, and the signed affidavit confirming that you orchestrated the abuse of my mother to force the Power of Attorney signature."
Abigail looked at Samuel, her eyes filled with a desperate, venomous hatred. "I hated her, Sam. I hated the way she looked at me, like I was some lower-class garbage who didn't deserve to be in this family. She was always judging me, always checking the bank books. I just wanted what was mine!"
"It was never yours," Samuel said, standing up from his chair. "You were a guest in our home, and you treated it like a bank to be robbed. The prosecutor is offering a plea deal: twenty years in a medium-security facility if you plead guilty to all counts of elder abuse, grand larceny, and conspiracy. If you refuse, we go to trial on the federal racketeering charges, and Arthur here will personally ensure you get the maximum sentence of fifty years without parole."
Abigail stared at the plea agreement document sitting on the table. Her hands shook as she picked up the cheap plastic pen provided by the guard.
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"Sign it, Abby," Samuel said coldly. "And don't ever look back."
With a shaky, trembling hand, Abigail signed her name on the dotted line, officially ending her freedom and her reign of terror over the Vance family.
