Camille screamed again and grabbed Mehar’s arm and Mehar held her steady and looked at me with an expression that said handle this because I’m handling her.
“Lyric,” I said. “Take Camille to the hospital. Right now. Take her car. Go.”
She grabbed Camille’s purse and her keys and helped Mehar guide Camille toward the door. They stepped around Mega’s bleeding body on the floor like he was a piece of furniture. Lyric and Camille disappeared into the elevator and the condo got quiet again.
Mehar looked down at Mega and then at me. “We’re taking him with us?”
“Yeah. He’s gonna show us exactly where she is.”
I pulled Mega off the floor by the back of his shirt and dragged him to his feet. His face was wrecked, nose broken, lip split, left eye swelling shut. He didn’t resist because there was nowhere to resist to. Rider took his left arm and I took his right and we walked him to the car.
Mehar drove. I sat in the passenger seat. Rider sat in the back with his gun pressed against Mega’s ribs. We pulled out of the parking garage and headed south toward Berryville.
Mega was sniffling in the backseat, blood dripping onto his shirt. “You promised you wouldn’t kill me slowly.”
“I did,” I said without turning around. “And I’m a man of my word. When it happens, you won’t feel a thing. But right now you’re alive because my sister needs to see the man who took her in handcuffs before he stops breathing. She deserves that.”
He didn’t say anything after that. Nobody did. The car was quiet and the highway stretched out in front of us and somewhere at the end of it, in a motel room off Route 340, my baby sister was tied to a bed waiting for somebody to come.
We were coming.
29
Vivica
I’d called the burner fourteen times in two days. Each time it rang through to a voicemail box that hadn’t been set up. No answer, no callback, no nothing. Mega had gone silent and silence from a man who was supposed to be my hands on the outside was the most dangerous sound I could hear from behind these walls.
Something had gone wrong. I could feel it the way I’d always felt shifts in power, in my bones, in the tightening of my chest before bad news arrived. Thirty years of running a city teaches you to recognize when the current changes direction. And right now, the current was changing.
I sat across from my attorney, Gerald Whitfield, in the private consultation room that smelled like industrial cleaner and fluorescent lighting. Gerald was expensive and competent and wore his pessimism like aftershave, which is why I hired him. I didn’t need a cheerleader. I needed a realist who could find the cracks in the prosecution’s case and drive a truck through them.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Honestly? Better than we were six months ago.” He opened his folder and spread his notes across the table. “The prosecution’s case is built on circumstantial evidence. Blood at the scene, your fingerprints on a knife, the text messages. But they have a significant problem.”
“No body.”
“No body. No confirmed cause of death. No witnesses. No murder weapon with DNA other than your fingerprints, which you can explain away through the nature of your relationship with the victim. You lived together intermittently. Of course your prints are on household items.” He clicked his pen. “And without a body, they can’t prove she’s dead. For all they know, India Coleman walked away from that apartment on her own two feet.”
“Which she did,” I said. Because that was the truth. I didn’t kill India. I didn’t know where she was or what happened to her after that night, but I knew I hadn’t killed her. My sons had staged this entire thing and dropped me in a cage for a crime that never happened. The blood was real but the murder was not. India was alive somewhere and my children had made sure I couldn’t prove it.
“Have your people been able to locate her?” I asked.
“No. We’ve run searches domestically and internationally. No passport activity, no credit card usage under her name, no social media presence. Wherever she is, someone has gone to great lengths to make her disappear. If we could produce her alive, the case collapses overnight. But right now she’s a ghost.”
“Keep looking.”
“We will. In the meantime, I’m filing a motion to dismiss based on insufficient evidence. Judge Harmon is sympathetic to procedural arguments. I think we have a real shot.”
A real shot. A year of rotting in this facility and those were the words he offered me. A real shot. As if Vivica Banks had eversettled for a shot when she could guarantee the outcome. But I was behind bars and my assets were frozen and my children had turned on me and the man I’d hired to execute my plans from the outside had stopped answering his phone. A shot was all I had left.
“Thank you, Gerald. Keep me updated.”
He gathered his papers and left and I sat in the consultation room alone for a few minutes because the guards let me. They let me do a lot of things because even in a jumpsuit, some women carry authority that uniforms can’t strip away. I wasn’t the mayor anymore but I was still Vivica Banks. And Vivica Banks didn’t beg for extra time in a room. She simply took it and dared someone to object.
Later that afternoon, I got a visitor I wasn’t expecting.
Dante walked into the visitation room looking like he’d been dragged down a flight of stairs. His left eye was swollen, his lip was split, and he was holding his ribs like at least one of them was cracked. He sat across from me and couldn’t meet my eyes.
