***
The interrogation room at One Police Plaza was freezing.
I’d been awake for nearly forty-eight hours, sitting beneath fluorescent lights with handcuffs around my wrists.
Across the table, Detective Marcus Callahan opened a thick folder.
“Eleanor Vance, we’ve completed the preliminary investigation into your father’s death.”
I looked up.
“My father didn’t have an accident?”
Callahan’s expression remained serious.
“No. Arthur Vance was exposed to a dangerous substance. The medical examiner believes someone deliberately interfered with his medication.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
Arthur Vance wasn’t my biological father, but he’d raised me since I was eight.
He’d taught me how to ride a bicycle, helped me through college, and eventually trusted me to lead the business he’d spent forty years building.
He was my entire family.
And now someone was telling me his death hadn’t been natural.
