Chapter 6 - The Long Road South
The Avery County substation smelled of stale Maxwell House, damp wool, and floor wax. Outside the frosted windows, dawn was just beginning to break over the crest of Grandfather Mountain, painting the low-hanging fog in bruising shades of violet and gray.
Across the steel interrogation table sat Deputy Sheriff Miller and Special Agent Harris from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. Between us lay Warren’s battered leather satchel, unbuckled and open. The plastic evidence bags containing the four amber specimen vials of antimony, the bank records from Box 414 in Asheville, and the certified deed to the Hermitage Road estate caught the hum of the fluorescent tube lights overhead.
“Mrs. Sterling,” Agent Harris said, his reading glasses perched low on his nose as he turned the page of Brielle’s recorded confession from the cruiser dashcam. “In thirty years of state service, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a paper trail this airtight. Your son documented his own homicide with forensic precision.”
My throat tightened, but I kept my hands folded squarely over my lap. My knuckles were still scratched from the splintered floorboards beneath the cabin altar, and my black mourning dress bore dried mud along the hem. But I felt none of the bone-deep weariness that had crushed me two days ago when Brielle dumped my suitcases on the curb.
“Warren was an architect by trade,” I answered quietly. “Before that, he was a draftsman. He didn’t build anything without double-checking the foundation. When he realized what Brielle and Vance were doing to him, he built their gallows plank by plank.”
Marcus leaned against the cinderblock wall behind me, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes bloodshot but razor-sharp. “Where is Brielle now?”
“Transported to the regional detention facility in Morganton under twenty-four-hour suicide watch,” Miller said. “No bail. First-degree attempted arson, felony assault, and as soon as the State Medical Examiner in Charlotte completes the tissue panel from the exhumation order, we’re filing capital murder charges.”
“And Douglas Vance?” Marcus asked.
Agent Harris grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck. “Vance cleared out of his Uptown Charlotte firm yesterday afternoon forty minutes before our marshals arrived with the search warrant. His secretary told investigators he left with two hard cases. We have an active BOLO out on his Mercedes S-Class across four states, and his passport has been flagged with Homeland Security. But the man knows the law, Marcus. He knows which jurisdictional cracks to slip through.”
“He isn’t running out of the country,” I said, looking up.
Both men turned their eyes toward me.
“He isn’t?” Harris asked.
“Douglas Vance is arrogant,” I said, remembering the way he had tapped his gold Montblanc pen against my wooden table, the sneer in his voice when he thought I was just an uneducated mountain widow. “He thinks he’s smarter than the police, smarter than the courts, and smarter than me. But more than that, he’s broke. Warren told me months ago that Vance had lost millions in bad commercial real estate speculation along the coast. Brielle was his lifeline. And that four-million-dollar house on Hermitage Road holds what he needs.”
“What does it hold?” Marcus stepped forward.
“Warren’s home office has an integrated fire-suppression safe behind the cherry paneling,” I explained. “Brielle never had the combination; Warren told her the master keys were held in corporate escrow. But Vance drew up the original escrow agreement six years ago. If Vance is going to disappear, he won’t do it penniless. He knows the bearer bonds and the title documents to the overseas brokerage accounts are in that wall safe. And he thinks nobody is there to stop him.”
Agent Harris immediately reached for his radio. “I’ll notify Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD to set a perimeter around the Myers Park property.”
“No,” Marcus interjected firmly, stepping in. “If CMPD puts squad cars at the front gate, Vance spots them from two blocks away, ditches his car, and vanishes into the wind with whatever offshore burner accounts he already has. We need him caught red-handed inside that house, breaking the safe. That ties him to the conspiracy, the burglary, and Warren’s murder in one clean sweep.”
Marcus looked at me. His jaw was set in that familiar, stubborn line of the Sterling family. “Hector is still inside the grounds, isn’t he?”
“Hector hasn’t left,” I said. “He’s been tending Warren’s grounds since Warren bought the place. He loved my boy like a son.”
I stood up from the metal chair. Every joint in my body ached, but when I took a breath, the mountain air felt clean and clear.
“Agent Harris,” I said, extending my hand. “You have everything you need to keep Brielle in a cage for the rest of her natural life. Now give me the certified copies of the trust deed and the emergency injunction. My son built that home for our family. And I am going back to Hermitage Road.”
Harris hesitated for three seconds, looking between my steady gaze and Marcus’s imposing frame. Then he nodded, reaching into his briefcase and handing me the blue-backed legal documents bearing the red seal of the Mecklenburg County Superior Court.
“We’ll have two plainclothes tactical units trailing twenty minutes behind you,” Harris said. “Don’t go in alone until CMPD is on the street.”
“I’m never alone,” I murmured, touching the small, cool chrome of Warren’s Zippo lighter tucked securely inside the pocket of my coat.
We walked out into the biting morning air. Marcus opened the passenger door of his F-250, and I climbed in without a sound. As the diesel engine rumbled to life, roaring down Highway 221 toward Interstate 40, I watched the high Blue Ridge peaks recede in the side mirror.
Brielle had sent me up into those mountains to freeze in the dark, believing I would fade into obscurity like an old photograph left in the rain. She hadn’t understood that the roots of the mountain pine run deep, wrapped around granite that doesn’t break under winter storms.
We turned south toward Charlotte.
Two hours down the interstate, the wild spruce and hemlock gave way to rolling piedmont, and then to the manicured, sprawling wealth of Mecklenburg County. Oak canopies arched over Queens Road, their leaves just beginning to blush gold and amber under the autumn sun.
When we turned onto Hermitage Road, the contrast was violent. Here sat the white-columned mansions, the sprawling English boxwoods, the wrought-iron gates that protected the old Southern money and the new corporate titans. Warren had bought 240 Hermitage Road because he wanted me to have a garden where roses could bloom without frost killing them in April.
As Marcus slowed the truck half a block away, tucked behind a screen of weeping willows, my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was an incoming call from Hector.
I pressed the screen. “Hector?”
His voice was a frantic, low whisper. “Mrs. Theresa? Where are you?”
“I’m outside the gate, Hector. What’s happening?”
“It’s Vance,” Hector whispered, the sound of his breath ragged against the receiver. “He arrived twenty minutes ago in an unmarked gray sedan. He came through the service gate with an electronic jammer. He bypassed the security panel and broke through the terrace French doors. He’s up in Mr. Warren’s private study right now with a rotary cutting torch. I heard the metal grinding from the carriage house.”
My blood ran hot and cold at once.
“Is anyone with him?” I asked.
“No, ma'am. He’s alone. He looks wild—shirt unbuttoned, no tie, sweating through his jacket. Mrs. Theresa, what do I do?”
“Stay in the carriage house, Hector,” I ordered softly. “Lock the doors and do not approach him. We are coming through the front.”
I hung up and looked at Marcus. He had already heard every word through the truck’s speakers.
Marcus didn’t speak. He reached down beside his seat, checked the magazine on his Glock, clicked off the safety, and slipped the heavy weapon into the inside pocket of his canvas coat.
May you like
“Let’s go take your house back,” he said.
***
