Chapter 12 - The Mutilated Mouth
The air inside the federal supermax facility smelled of industrial bleach, cold steel, and violence. Julian was flanked by two federal marshals as he stepped across the yellow evidence tape into Cell 414.
Marcus Vance—the man who had orchestrated Julian’s ruined life, the man who had planted fake wives and stolen babies to seize the Vance empire—hung limp from the top bunk. His eyes were wide open, bulging with petechial hemorrhages that betrayed sheer terror before his demise.
Agent Miller of the FBI met Julian at the threshold, holding a clipboard of preliminary autopsy notes. "We scrubbed the security feeds, Julian. The cameras glitched for exactly four minutes at 05:12 AM. When the loop cleared, your uncle was like this. No forced entry. No guard keys registered."
Julian stepped closer, his jaw locked tight. He ignored the stench of death and looked down at Marcus’s severed jaw. The cut was clean, executed with surgical precision using a tungsten scalpel. On the gray concrete floor beneath Marcus’s dangling feet, written in the dead man’s own arterial spray, was a single phrase:
*THE VAULT HAS NO DOORS.*
"He was trying to speak before they killed him," Julian muttered, crouched beside the pool of drying blood. "The warden told me Marcus requested an emergency deposition yesterday afternoon. What did he say on the intake audio?"
Miller hesitated, glancing at the federal marshals behind him. "He was hysterical. He kept screaming that the car crash three years ago wasn't an assassination. He said it was an extraction."
"An extraction?" Julian’s hands clenched into white-knuckle fists. "Clara’s body was identified by dental records! I buried my wife with my own hands!"
"Did you?" Miller asked quietly, pulling a file from beneath his arm. "Because we just re-ran the coroner's report from 2021. The dental records were uploaded to the state database by a private dental surgeon named Dr. Arthur Finch. Two days after Clara’s funeral, Finch received an offshore wire transfer of four million dollars from an account in Liechtenstein. Six months later, Finch drowned in a boating incident in the Bahamas."
Julian felt the floor tilt beneath him. For three long years, he had wept over an empty slab of granite, believing his soulmate was ashes beneath the earth, while his son Leo grew up with nightmares of a mother who vanished into black smoke.
"Where is the body?" Julian demanded, his voice dropping into a guttural growl that made the seasoned FBI agent take a half-step back. "Where is the corpse I buried in the family crypt?"
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"The local magistrate issued an exhumation order an hour ago upon my request," Miller said gravely. "If you want the truth, Julian, you better get back to St. Jude’s Cemetery. The backhoes are already tearing up the turf."
***
