Chapter 2 - Handcuffs in the SanctuaryThe metallic click of the handcuffs locking around Daniel’s wrists sounded like a heavy prison door slamming shut inside the chapel.
Vanessa shrieked as another uniformed officer gripped her arm, forcing her hands behind her back. Her tight, revealing black dress, which she had worn like a crown to mock my grief, now made her look incredibly pathetic.
"Get your hands off me!" Vanessa screamed, her voice losing its seductive smoothness, turning shrill and panicked. "Do you know who my father is? He will have your badges for this! Daniel, tell them! Tell them it’s a mistake!"
But Daniel couldn't speak. His arrogant posture had completely vanished. He stood frozen beside Lily’s white coffin, his eyes darting from the gold badge in Detective Ruiz’s hand to the encrypted federal evidence box held by my attorney, Evelyn Shaw.
"Sarah, please," Daniel stammered, his voice dropping into a desperate, shaking whisper as the eyes of three hundred guests burned into his back. "This is a funeral. Our daughters... you can't let them do this in front of our babies. Tell the detectives to wait outside. We can settle this privately."
"Privately?" I stepped forward, the physical pain in my throbbing temple completely ignored, drowned out by the icy clarity in my soul. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small cloth, gently wiping a drop of my own blood from the polished white wood of my daughter's coffin where Daniel had smashed my head. "You didn't care about privacy when you threw me against our daughter’s casket, Daniel. You didn't care about our babies when you laughed at the back of this church."
"We have the traffic camera metadata, Mr. Mercer," Detective Ruiz said, his voice dropping like a heavy hammer in the quiet sanctuary. "We have the black-box data from your SUV, which was recovered yesterday morning. The vehicle didn't slip on a wet road. The braking system was deliberately disabled via the electronic control module at 2:14 PM on the day of the crash—exactly twelve minutes after your phone logs show a call to the babysitter."
The chapel fell into a suffocating, terrifying silence. My relatives in the front pews stared at Daniel with an expression of pure, unadulterated horror.
"You... you killed them?" my mother sobbed from the second row, collapsing into my brother's arms. "Daniel, you monster! You killed my girls!"
"No! It was the babysitter! She was the one driving!" Daniel shrieked, his face turning an ugly, distorted shade of crimson as the officers began to drag him down the center aisle.
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Vanessa wept hysterically, her expensive mascara running down her cheeks in dark, ugly streaks as she was escorted right behind him. As she passed my chair, she glinted at me with pure, desperate venom, but I merely stood tall, my hands resting over my heart, watching them go.
The first line of defense had been breached. They were in chains, but as a forensic accountant, I knew that a monster like Daniel always had a secondary trap hidden in his financial books. And I was about to audit his entire life until there was nowhere left for him to hide.
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