Chapter 8 - The Cornered Rats Turn on Each Other
There is no honor among thieves, but among arrogant parasites, there isn't even basic loyalty.
By Saturday afternoon, the federal indictments had expanded to encompass Diane and Vanessa Mercer as co-conspirators in the federal racketeering charges. Faced with the reality of spending the next twenty to thirty years inside a federal correctional institution, the Mercer family did what all cowards do when the fire gets too hot.
They turned on each other with the ferocity of starved wolves.
In federal interrogation room B, Vanessa Mercer sat across from her court-appointed attorney and two federal investigators.
Her fake tan had faded, leaving her skin sallow and blotchy. Her expensive hair extensions were tangled and greasy. Without her makeup, her filters, and her luxury wardrobe, she looked ten years older, hollowed out by fear and sleepless nights.
“I didn't know!” Vanessa sobbed, blowing her nose into a rough brown paper towel. “I swear on my life, I didn't know about the bridge! Grant just told me to set up the consulting company so we could write off our travel! He said it was legal tax optimization!”
“Ms. Mercer,” the investigator said, pointing to a signature on an offshore banking manifest. “You personally signed for the wire transfer from the foreign steel supplier that kicked back $600,000 into your account. You signed the shipping manifest as the registered import agent.”
“Because Grant forced me!” Vanessa shrieked, slamming her hands on the table. “He threatened me! He said if I didn't sign the papers, he would cut off my allowance and kick me out of the apartment! And my mother—Mom was the mastermind! Mom told Grant to use my name because she said nobody would suspect an influencer! It was all Diane! She ran the books! She gambled the money away!”
Vanessa pulled a thumb drive from her pocket, sliding it across the table like a lifeline. “This has all the emails. Every single email between Grant and Mom discussing how they were going to use Clara’s trust money to replace the funds they stole from the bridge project! I kept backups because I knew Grant would try to blame me eventually! Take it! Take it all! Just please, don't send me to prison! Give me probation! I can’t survive in prison, I have asthma!”
Meanwhile, down the hall in interrogation room D, Diane Mercer was singing the exact same tune, with even more venom.
Diane sat wrapped in a coarse prison blanket, her hands shaking violently from nicotine withdrawal and panic.
“My son is a sociopath,” Diane said without a single trace of maternal warmth, her voice icy and dead. “From the moment he was a boy, Grant was obsessed with wealth he didn't earn. When he started Sterling Crest, he forged my signature on dozens of loan applications. I was merely trying to protect my family from his catastrophic business failures.”
The federal prosecutor leaned back, smiling faintly. “Mrs. Mercer, we have surveillance footage of you personally delivering an envelope containing twenty thousand dollars in cash to the building inspector’s car behind a diner in Queens.”
Diane didn't even blink. “Grant sent me. He told me it was a payment for architectural renderings. He lied to me. He used his own mother as an errand girl! And Vanessa—Vanessa was spending fifty thousand dollars a week on clothes! She was black-mailing Grant! She told him she would expose his offshore accounts to Clara if he didn't keep funneling money into Aura Luxe!”
“So you’re saying your son and daughter are entirely responsible for the fraud?”
“Yes!” Diane proclaimed, her voice trembling with desperate conviction. “They manipulated me! They took advantage of an elderly widow! I will testify against both of them. Put Grant away for life! Put Vanessa in a reformatory! Just give me house arrest! I have heart palpitations! I cannot be in this environment!”
Two hours later, in a joint proffer conference room, the prosecutors brought all three of them together alongside their respective attorneys to review the conflicting plea offers.
The moment the door opened and Grant saw his mother and sister sitting across the table, the illusion of family loyalty shattered forever.
“You gave them my thumb drive?!” Grant roared, straining against the heavy steel belly-chain that bound his wrists to his waist. “Vanessa, you little rat! I bought you your entire life! I paid for your surgeries! I paid for your cars! And you handed over my personal emails?!”
“You tried to pin thirty years of bridge fraud on me, Grant!” Vanessa screamed back, rising from her chair and spitting across the table. “You’re a failure! You were always a pathetic loser who couldn't build a doghouse without daddy’s money, and when daddy died, you tried to steal Clara’s! You ruined us! Look at me! Look at what you did to my career!”
“Your career?!” Grant laughed hysterically, his voice breaking into a manic shriek. “You took pictures of your ass for teenage boys on the internet! That’s not a career! You’re a parasite!”
“Enough! Both of you, shut your mouths!” Diane bellowed, pounding the table. “Grant, you have destroyed this family name! You are no son of mine! Marcus Sterling was ten times the man you will ever be! You couldn't even control your own wife! You had to slap her like a drunken peasant and get caught on forty-K cameras! If you had just waited six months, we would have had the trust! You ruined everything because you wanted scrambled eggs at eleven in the morning!”
“I wanted scrambled eggs?!” Grant lunged across the table toward his mother, his face turning purple with rage. “You were the one who told me to hit her! You sat at the island and said, *‘A good wife serves her husband’s family! Teach her a lesson, Grant!’* You pushed me to do it! You gambled away four million dollars of my operating capital at the baccarat tables! YOU DID THIS TO US, YOU OLD HAG!”
Grant threw himself across the conference table, attempting to wrap his chained hands around Diane’s throat.
Diane shrieked in terror, falling backward off her chair. Vanessa began screaming uncontrollably, curling into a ball in the corner.
Six federal marshals rushed into the room, tackling Grant onto the table, driving his face hard into the wood, and pinning his shoulders with tactical batons.
“Restrain him! Get them out of here! Clear the room!”
As Grant was wrestled to the floor, coughing blood from a split lip, he looked at his mother cowering beneath the table, and then looked at his sister weeping in the corner.
They had turned on each other completely.
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There was no love. There was no loyalty. There was only the ugly, rotting truth of what they had always been: three greedy, selfish predators who had eaten each other alive the moment the prey fought back.
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