Chapter 16 - The Interrogation Room in Brooklyn
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Forty-eight hours later, on Sunday afternoon, I sat behind the one-way observation glass at the Brooklyn Homicide Task Force headquarters alongside Detective Frank Russo—the retired NYPD investigator my father had hired before his death, who had come out of retirement the moment I called him on Friday night—and Assistant District Attorney Rachel Torres.
Inside the harsh white fluorescent light of Interrogation Room B sat Marcus.
He was wearing an orange federal detainee jumpsuit, his wrists shackled to the steel bolt in the center of the metal table. Next to him sat his court-appointed public defender—because every private defense attorney in Manhattan had dropped him the moment his assets were zeroed out.
Across the table from Marcus, ADA Torres slid three items onto the metal surface:
First, the crime-scene photograph of Brenda in Bellevue Hospital’s prison ward with a broken nose and two fractured ribs, where she had already given a three-hour videotaped confession after being caught red-handed with a syringe full of lethal potassium chloride and fentanyl in my brownstone hallway.
Second, the transcript of the October 13th Mount Sinai audio recording from my father’s bedside lamp.
And third, the unsealed exhumation order signed by a Massachusetts Superior Court judge that morning for the body of Evelyn Sterling-Hayes in Boston.
On the other side of the glass, I watched Marcus stare down at the photograph of Evelyn Hayes—the twenty-nine-year-old blonde woman he and Brenda had murdered seven years ago to steal the two-million-dollar seed money he had used to buy his way into his Manhattan investment firm and reinvent himself as "Marcus Vance."
For five minutes as the Mount Sinai audio recording played through the speaker on the table—his own voice telling my dying father to hold still while Brenda injected his IV line—Marcus didn't move a muscle.
When the flatline tone of my father’s cardiac monitor echoed through the small concrete room and clicked off, his public defender slowly closed his legal pad, stood up without saying a word, and stepped back against the wall, signaling he had nothing left to advise.
"Brenda already signed her cooperation statement an hour ago to avoid the federal death-penalty certification on interstate murder-for-hire, Mr. Hayes," ADA Torres said coldly. "She told us how the two of you met in Boston eight years ago. She told us how you pushed Evelyn Hayes down the cellar stairs when the sedative Brenda gave her didn't stop her heart fast enough. And she told us that your real plan for New Year’s Day wasn't to divorce Clara—it was to come back from Lake Tahoe on January second after Brenda staged Clara’s overdose on New Year’s Eve, play the devastated husband returning from Zurich, and collect the $3.7 million plus a $2 million spousal life insurance policy you took out on Clara in October."
I pressed my palm flat against the cool observation glass.
A spousal life insurance policy in October.
Wait—I hadn't even known about that! When Marcus had left on Christmas morning and kissed my forehead, saying "I'm sorry, Elena—er, Clara," he hadn't been apologizing for going to Lake Tahoe with Vanessa.
He had been saying goodbye because he believed that while he was hundreds of miles away with a rock-solid alibi in Tahoe, Brenda was going to murder me at the New Year’s Eve dinner in Scarsdale—and he would never see me alive again!
Inside the room, Marcus slowly lifted his shackled hands and looked directly at the one-way mirror, knowing with certainty that I was standing on the other side watching him.
His charming smile was gone. The corporate veneer was gone. All that remained was the hollow, raging shell of a sociopath who had been outplayed at every single turn by the wife he thought was a doormat.
"Tell Clara I want to see her," Marcus rasped, his voice raw. "Five minutes. And I’ll sign the guilty plea to both counts of Murder in the First Degree right now without a trial, waiving every appeal for life without parole."
ADA Torres glanced toward the mirror, then stepped out into the observation booth.
May you like
"You don't have to go in there, Mrs. Mercer," Torres told me quietly—using my maiden name, which the judge had restored on Friday. "We have him cold on the recording and Brenda’s testimony. He’s never seeing the sun outside a maximum-security wall again."
"I want to go in," I said calmly. "Leave the door open and keep his wrists bolted to the steel ring."
