Chapter 5 - The Glass Tower
The District Attorney’s office was located on the eleventh floor of a glass tower that overlooked the Susquehanna River. The water below was brown and swollen from the week’s rain, churning violently against the concrete pillars of the bridges.
I felt small in my borrowed clothes—a dark wool coat and a simple black dress that Daniel’s assistant had delivered to the house that morning. Leo was asleep in a gray fabric carrier strapped to my chest, his small head rising and falling against my sternum.
We were met in the lobby by a woman named Clara Vance—no relation to Arthur, Daniel had assured me, though she had the same sharp, old-money look about her. She was a senior assistant DA with graying hair and eyes like chipped flint.
"Daniel," she said, shaking his hand briefly before turning her gaze to me. She looked at Leo for a moment, her expression softening just a fraction before returning to business. "The paperwork you sent over this morning is... problematic for the Vance family. If half of this is true, Ryan Vance has committed third-degree felony endangerment of a child, not to mention fraud regarding the estate probate."
"It’s all true, Clara," Daniel said, sitting down in one of the leather chairs before she could invite him to. "I have the telemetry from my car’s dashcam showing Emily on the shoulder of Route 322 at 12:14 AM. I have the medical reports from the Harrisburg Hospital ER showing the baby’s core temperature upon arrival. And I have the forensic audit of the Vance shipping accounts showing Ryan transferred three million dollars into a Swiss account forty-eight hours before he put his wife out in the rain."
Clara sat behind her large mahogany desk, flipping through a thick blue folder. "Ryan’s lawyers are already calling my boss," she said. "They’re claiming this is a custody dispute, that Emily has a history of psychological instability stemming from her time in foster care."
I stood up from my chair, my hands automatically covering Leo’s back. "I have never been medicated, I have never been institutionalized, and I worked forty hours a week as an accountant until the day my son was born," I said, my voice shaking with a rage I hadn't known I possessed. "Ryan Vance left us to die because I wouldn't sign away my son's rights to an estate I didn't even know existed. You can look at my record all you want, Ms. Vance, but his record is written on my skin from the cold that night."
Clara looked at me for a long time, the silence in the room broken only by the hum of the HVAC system. Then, she closed the blue folder with a decisive snap.
"We aren't going to arrest him yet," she said.
"Clara," Daniel began, his voice dangerous.
May you like
"Listen to me, Daniel," she interrupted, holding up a hand. "If we arrest him now on a domestic incident, his lawyers will have him out on bail in two hours. He’ll hide the assets, he’ll flee the jurisdiction, and we’ll be fighting an extradition battle for the next five years while this girl lives in hiding. We need him to think he’s winning. We need him to go to the bank."
She looked at me. "Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock, there is a closed-door hearing regarding the injunction Ryan filed for emergency custody. He thinks you’re going to show up with a public defender, or not show up at all. I want you there, Emily. With Daniel. And I want you to look him in the eye when the state troopers step into the room."
