Chapter 5 - The Interrogation Room
The interrogation wing of the Seattle Police Department’s downtown headquarters was a bleak, clinical labyrinth of scuffed linoleum, flickering fluorescent lights, and heavy concrete walls. The air smelled of stale coffee, cold rain, and the lingering residue of human desperation.
I sat behind a one-way mirror in an observation room adjacent to Interrogation Room B. Detective Vance stood beside me, holding two paper cups of dark roast coffee. Across the two-way glass, Victoria Reynolds sat at a metal table. Her immaculate ivory blouse was now stained with water and street grime, her expensive hair twist had fallen apart into messy strands, and her wrists were cuffed to a heavy iron ring bolted to the center of the table.
Sitting beside her was Arthur Pendelton—a legendary, ridiculously expensive defense attorney who had represented the Reynolds empire for three decades. He looked thoroughly uncomfortable, his immaculate three-piece suit clashing horribly with the dingy interrogation room.
"She hasn't said a word in three hours," Vance murmured, handing me one of the coffee cups. "Pendelton is trying to claim the video footage is an unauthenticated AI hallucination generated by the hospital's security system."
"Can he get her off on that?" I asked, my voice tight.
"Not a chance," Vance replied grimly. "While you were driving up from Portland, our digital forensics team executed a search warrant on Victoria’s private residence in Mercer Island. They seized her personal laptop, encrypted cloud backups, and off-grid storage drives."
"Did they find something?"
Vance smiled—a cold, ruthless expression. "We found her private research journal from 2020. She documented the precise chemical composition of the synthetic potassium compound she synthesized at Reynolds BioTech. She even kept a digital ledger tracking the offshore accounts she used to hide the eighty million dollars she reclaimed from the family trust after Ethan died."
In the interrogation room, the door opened. Detective Maya Lin walked in, carrying a thick red expandable folder. She dropped it onto the metal table with a loud, echoic THUD that made Victoria flinch.
"Ms. Reynolds," Lin began, sitting down opposite the suspect and opening the folder. "Your attorney here has been spending the last three hours telling us about 'chain of custody issues' and 'unauthenticated video files.' So, let's stop talking about video."
Lin pulled out a stack of printed documents, sliding them across the table one by one.
"This is a requisition order from Reynolds BioTech dated October twelfth, 2020, signed with your private digital key, for ten milligrams of pharmaceutical-grade potassium chloride," Lin said, tapping the first document.
Victoria’s jaw clenched, but she remained silent, looking toward the wall.
"This," Lin continued, sliding a second document, "is a cell tower ping from your personal phone, placing you within fifty feet of the St. Jude Children's Hospital NICU at three fourteen AM on October fourteenth—the exact minute our video shows the intruder entering Ethan Reynolds' room."
Pendelton leaned over, whispering urgently into Victoria’s ear, but she brushed him away, her dark eyes staring fixedly at the papers on the table.
"And finally," Lin said, pulling out a final, heavy document with a red federal seal, "this is a wire transfer record from the Reynolds Master Trust dated November second, 2020. Three weeks after Ethan’s death, eighty-two million dollars was released from the child reserve fund and transferred directly into an offshore shell company in the Cayman Islands called Valkyrie Holdings. The sole beneficial owner of Valkyrie Holdings is Dr. Victoria Reynolds."
Lin leaned across the table, her face inches from Victoria's.
"You didn't just kill your nephew, Victoria. You executed him with military precision, stolen hospital supplies, and a paper trail so obvious a high school accounting student could follow it. First-degree aggravated murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole in the State of Washington. You are never walking out of a state penitentiary again."
Victoria’s breathing grew rapid and shallow. Her aristocratic composure crumbled completely. She glared at Detective Lin, her eyes burning with a terrifying, venomous rage.
"He was an abomination!" Victoria suddenly shrieked, slamming her cuffed hands against the metal table with a deafening metallic clang.
"Victoria, shut up!" Pendelton shouted, grabbing her arm. "Do not speak!"
"No! I won't shut up!" Victoria screamed, her face contorting into an ugly, psychotic mask. "That common, low-class whore Sarah trapped my brother! She brought her dirty, defective bloodline into our family! That child was weak! He was born premature, he was fragile, and he was going to inherit eighty million dollars of Reynolds money while I did all the real work!"
Behind the glass, I gasped, clutching my coffee cup so hard the cardboard collapsed, spilling hot liquid over my fingers. I didn't feel the burn.
"I built Reynolds BioTech!" Victoria spat, bloodline-obsessed madness spilling out of her like venom. "I spent my entire life building this family's fortune! I wasn't going to let some mechanic's daughter and her half-breed brat steal what belonged to me! He was going to die anyway! I just sped up the process! I saved this family!"
The interrogation room went dead quiet.
Detective Lin slowly closed her folder, stood up from her chair, and looked down at Victoria with utter disgust.
"Thank you, Ms. Reynolds," Lin said softly. "That confession was recorded on three separate high-definition audio visual channels. Have a nice life in prison."
Lin turned and walked out of the room, leaving Victoria screaming at her terrified attorney as the heavy door slammed shut.
Beside me in the observation room, Detective Vance tapped my shoulder gently. "It’s over, Sarah. She just sealed her own fate."
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I looked through the glass at the pathetic, screaming woman who had destroyed my life. The fear, the guilt, and the self-hatred that had consumed me for six years didn't just fade—they burnt away completely in the fires of justice.
"Not yet," I whispered, turning toward the door. "There's still one more person who needs to pay."
