Chapter 5 - The Bail Out
The bail hearing lasted exactly six minutes.
The state prosecutor, a humorless woman with iron-gray hair named Henderson, stood before Judge Alvarez and laid out the facts like a butcher displaying prime cuts: the twenty-two million dollar land value, the forged trust documents bearing my signature, the burner phone records, Tyler’s taped confession, and the presence of human remains inside the incinerated structure on Maplecrest Drive.
"The defendant represents an extreme flight risk and an active danger to the community," Henderson declared, her voice booming off the oak-paneled courtroom walls. "The State requests remand without bail."
My public defender, a young, visibly exhausted attorney named Douglas who had spent all of ten minutes reviewing my file before the gavel fell, cleared his throat. "Your Honor, Ms. Vance has no prior criminal record. She has been a gainfully employed member of the community for seven years—"
"Save it, Mr. Douglas," Judge Alvarez interrupted, his pen scratching against the docket sheet. "In light of the severity of the charges and the flight risk posed by the foreign financial assets identified in Delaware, bail is set at five million dollars, cash or surety."
He slammed the gavel. *Crack.*
Five million dollars. I didn't have five thousand in my checking account. My house was ash. My car was in an impound lot.
They marched me out through the side holding door. I was doomed. The system had locked into place around Victoria’s design with the precision of a guillotine.
Then, at 2:00 PM, the cell door unlocked again.
A different guard stood outside, holding my personal effects in a clear plastic bin—my jeans, my blood-stained sneakers, my wallet.
"Vance. Change out. You're walking."
I blinked against the dim corridor light. "What?"
"Bond was posted twenty minutes ago. Full cash collateral."
Ten minutes later, I walked through the double blast-doors of the county detention center into the blinding glare of an overcast Wednesday afternoon.
Waiting beside a nondescript black Subaru Outback parked at the curb was a man in an unbuttoned trench coat, smoking a rolled cigarette. He had unruly dark hair, hollow, intelligent hazel eyes, and a scarred jawline that looked like it had stopped an errant hockey puck a decade ago.
*Leo Sterling.*
Victoria’s estranged older brother.
Leo was an investigative journalist for the *Tri-State Herald* until he was fired two years ago for publishing an unsanctioned exposé on municipal land corruption. He hadn't spoken to Victoria in five years.
"Get in," Leo said, flicking the cigarette butt into the gutter and opening the passenger door.
I stopped five feet away, my fists clenched inside the pockets of my borrowed sweatshirt. "Where did you get five million dollars, Leo?"
"I didn't," he said, holding up a sleek black transponder unit. "I put up my grandfather's coastal farm as collateral with a high-risk bond agent in Philadelphia, and agreed to have you fitted with an active GPS ankle monitor within two hours. You step outside a five-mile radius of the city limits, a tactical squad kicks down the door."
"Why are you doing this?" My voice broke. "Your sister—"
"My sister is a sociopath," Leo interrupted coldly, his eyes dead serious. "She drove my mother to suicide, she drained our family trust dry before she turned twenty-five, and she’s spent the last six months buying up shell corporations across the state line. If you stay in that cell, she wins. Tyler dies, you rot, and she sells the Vance ridge to an oil conglomerate masquerading as an infrastructure firm."
I scrambled into the passenger seat, slamming the door. The inside of his Subaru smelled of stale black coffee, printer ink, and cold air.
"Evelyn," I said, grabbing his arm as he threw the car into reverse. "Leo, they found a body in the house. Tyler said it was Gran. Victoria told me—"
"The medical examiner hasn't released the preliminary report," Leo cut in, accelerating sharply into the midday traffic. "My contact inside the county morgue says the victim’s height doesn't match Evelyn’s medical charts. Evelyn Vance had an artificial titanium hip replacement done at St. Jude's four years ago. The body they pulled from your hallway? Zero orthopedic hardware."
A sudden, dizzying rush of adrenaline flooded my veins.
"Gran is alive?"
"She's alive," Leo said grimly, watching the rearview mirror for tailing vehicles. "Or at least, she wasn't in that house when Tyler lit the porch. But whoever was inside died wearing Evelyn’s gold locket."
"Who was it?"
"A Jane Doe. Probably an unhoused woman Tyler or Victoria picked up near the interstate bus terminal to stage the crime scene." Leo turned onto an industrial bypass road, heading toward the burned ruins of Maplecrest Drive. "Victoria needed a body to trigger the immediate probate of the will. If Evelyn was merely 'missing,' the estate stays in legal limbo for seven years. A corpse with Evelyn’s jewelry forces the court to declare her dead."
"If Gran wasn't in the fire," I said, my heart pounding so fast I could barely draw breath, "where is she?"
"That's what we're going to find out," Leo replied, pulling the car to a stop two blocks away from my scorched property line, hidden behind the tree line of an abandoned construction yard. "Evelyn called you at 9:10 PM. You said she sounded like she was hiding."
"She said, *'He took the lockbox. He took everything.'* But Tyler didn't take everything."
I remembered the porch collapsing. The fire department's hoses spraying into the office.
"The metal lockbox Tyler had on the curb was a decoy," I realized aloud. "My father had a second compartment installed beneath the subfloor under the hallway linoleum. It’s lined with two-inch fireproof vault steel. Evelyn kept the real property records there. The ones Tyler didn't know about."
Leo reached beneath his seat and pulled out a heavy pair of work gloves and a short crowbar.
May you like
"The police tape is down on the rear perimeter," Leo said, his jaw setting. "We have twenty minutes before the arson task force comes back with the secondary search warrant. If the answers are in those ashes, Maya, you better dig fast."
***
