Chapter 10 - The Ransom Text
The cold glow of the smartphone screen cast an eerie blue light across the leather interior of the racing town car as Arthur Pendelton slammed his foot down on the accelerator, navigating the winding Virginia highway toward downtown.
“Mr. Pendelton,” I said, holding up the phone so the screen faced him. “We have a problem.”
Arthur glanced over for a fraction of a second, his eyes narrowing as he read the words glowing in the dark cabin: You have sixty minutes to hand over the key, Susan. Or your daughter Samantha never makes it home from her bridal fitting.
“Samantha,” I whispered, a cold wave of dread washing over me. Despite everything—despite her arrogance, her coldness, her siding with Greg and Eleanor to banish me from my own home—she was still my flesh and blood. “They have her.”
“It’s a secondary pressure tactic,” Arthur said, his voice hard as iron, though his hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. “They know Michael failed, so they’re pivoting to leverage your maternal instincts. If we stop for her now, we lose the window on the safe-deposit box. If we don't, her life is on the line.”
“We don't have to choose,” I said, my voice suddenly dropping into a register that made Arthur look sideways at me in surprise.
“What do you mean?”
“For seventeen years, Michael thought he was the brains of this family,” I said, unlocking the glove compartment of the town car—which Arthur had apparently left accessible—and pulling out a secure satellite tracking tablet that synced directly with the security systems of my Victorian manor and my properties across the state. “He thought I was just a housewife who cooked his meals and balanced his checkbooks. But while he was busy laundering syndicate money through shell companies, I was quietly installing encrypted GPS trackers in Samantha’s car keys every single time she brought her Audi by for maintenance.”
I tapped three times on the screen. A glowing red dot flashed brightly on the digital map of downtown Charlottesville, moving rapidly away from the country club toward the industrial rail yards near the riverfront.
“She’s not at a bridal fitting,” I said, my eyes locking onto the blinking dot with cold, absolute resolve. “She’s being held in the old brick warehouse behind the municipal yards—the exact same property the syndicate used for their dummy logistics front twelve years ago, the night my father was murdered.”
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Arthur stared at the tablet, a slow, grim smile spreading across his face. “Mrs. Vance... I think I vastly underestimated what kind of woman you really are.”
“You had no idea,” I replied, sliding the brass key out of my coat pocket and laying it flat across my palm. “Step on it, Mr. Pendelton. Let’s go collect my daughter, and then let’s take down an empire.”
