Chapter 10
The trial was six weeks away.
Richard decided it was time to go on the offensive.
“Vanessa’s greatest weapon is her mystery,” he told Michael over coffee in the study. “Everyone sees the grieving stepmother. No one knows who she really is. We need to change that. We need to dig into her past. Every job. Every boyfriend. Every address. Every skeleton in every closet. People like Vanessa don’t become monsters overnight. They practice. And somewhere out there are other victims who can prove it.”
He hired a team of private investigators—five of the best in the country.
They worked around the clock.
What they found was worse than anyone had imagined.
Vanessa Reed had been married before.
Twice.
First husband: Daniel Torres. A wealthy real estate developer in Miami. Married for eighteen months. Died in a “tragic boating accident” that the police had always suspected was foul play but could never prove. Vanessa inherited forty million dollars.
Second husband: Robert Chen. A hedge fund manager in New York. Married for two years. Committed “suicide” by jumping from the balcony of their penthouse. Left a note that no handwriting expert could definitively match to his hand. Vanessa inherited sixty-five million.
Both men had been recently widowed with young children when Vanessa met them.
Both had updated their wills in her favor weeks before they died.
Both children had been sent away to boarding schools within a month of the funerals.
And in both cases, there had been allegations of abuse—allegations that Vanessa had convinced the authorities were the troubled fantasies of grieving children.
“She’s a serial black widow,” Richard said, spreading the police reports across Michael’s desk. “She marries grieving wealthy men with children. She isolates them. She abuses the kids into silence. Then she kills the husband, takes the money, and discards the children. You were supposed to be husband number three. Score number three. The biggest one yet.”
Michael felt sick.
He had almost been next.
If he hadn’t come home early that day. If Lily hadn’t whispered the truth. If Ethan hadn’t recorded the videos…
He would be dead by now.
And his children would be in Vanessa’s custody—until they were old enough to be sent away.
“This changes everything,” Michael said. “We can prove she’s not just abusive. We can prove she’s a murderer.”
“Slow down,” Richard warned. “These are old cases. Cold cases. No convictions. No smoking guns. Circumstantial evidence at best. If we bring this into the custody trial, it will muddy the waters. Diana Voss will claim we fabricated everything to defame her client. The judge might throw it all out and sanction us.”
“So what do we do?”
“We give it to the police,” Richard said. “Not the local cops—they’re too slow. We give everything to the FBI. The pattern is too clear. Three husbands. Three identical stories. Two hundred million dollars in inheritances. They’ll open a task force. They’ll dig. And while they’re digging, we keep our focus on the custody trial. We win full permanent custody. We make sure Vanessa can never come within a thousand miles of Ethan and Lily again. And when the FBI finally arrests her for murder—we’ll be there to watch her go away forever.”
Michael picked up the police report from Miami.
He looked at the photograph of Daniel Torres’s two children—a boy and a girl, roughly the same ages Ethan and Lily had been when Vanessa married Michael.
They had survived too.
Somehow.
“I want to talk to them,” he said.
“Michael, that’s not a good idea.”
“I don’t care. They know what she is. They lived through what my kids lived through. If they’ll talk to me—if they’ll testify—maybe we can finally stop her before she kills again.”
May you like
Richard sighed.
“I’ll make the calls. But be prepared. They’ve spent ten years trying to forget Vanessa Reed. Most people who survive monsters don’t want to be reminded they exist.”
