Chapter 12 - The Last Confession
Before Richard Vance was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana, he requested one final audience with me.
Captain Alvarez advised against it, but I needed to close the chapter on my own terms. I drove down to the Nashville federal transfer depot alone.
Richard looked like an empty shell. The booming, arrogant patriarch of my childhood was withered, his skin gray, his shoulders slumped beneath his prison jumpsuit. He sat across the stainless-steel table, his hands chained to the floor bolt.
"You took everything, Rebecca," he croaked, not daring to meet my eyes.
"You gave it away when you tried to kill my mother and sell my life," I replied evenly.
"I didn't try to kill Clara," Richard mumbled, shaking his head slowly. "You don't understand... you never understood. Mercer didn't plan it. Julian didn't plan it."
I leaned forward, my jaw tightening. "What are you talking about?"
"Julian was terrified of them," Richard whispered, his eyes darting toward the security cameras in the corners of the room as if invisible phantoms were watching him. "The company that bought the timber leases twenty years ago... they weren't interested in the trees, Becca. They were interested in what was buried under the northern ridge of the Sinclair land."
A chill ran down my spine. "What's under the ridge?"
"Clara found out before she died," Richard said, his breath hitching in his chest. "A toxic waste disposal site from an unregistered defense contractor in the nineties. Thousands of barrels of weaponized chemical runoff buried deep in the limestone caves. Clara was going to blow the whistle. That's why the car went off the road. Not for the money... to silence her."
Richard finally looked up at me, his eyes bloodshot and full of genuine, frantic terror.
May you like
"They let us steal your trust because as long as the land was locked in probate dispute, the state couldn't survey the soil! But now... now you own it, Becca. You own the deed. You're going to open that land. And the people who put those barrels in the limestone... they have badges much higher than Colonel Vance."
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