Chapter 7
660words
She didn't spare the screen a glance. Her eyes bored through me, fixed on some invisible point beyond. I realized negotiation had never been on the table. This woman hadn't come to deal—she'd come to pronounce sentence.
My phone buzzed—Tech Department. "Mike, that master stock pot is basically a biological black hole. Analysis is at a standstill. We can't isolate a damn thing."
The door swung open as officers escorted Sarah Thompson and her husband Robert into the visiting area. Sarah's face was stripped of makeup, raw with tear tracks and naked desperation. She dropped to her knees with a hollow thud and crawled toward Mei Lin, only to be intercepted by the guards at the security line.
"Please, Lin! I'm begging you!" she wailed, all pretense of dignity abandoned. "It's Robert's fault! All Robert! He'd wave Amy's perfect grades in Jack's face, call him worthless, demand why he couldn't match his half-sister! Robert drove Jack to hate her!"
Robert Thompson's face resembled cold-rolled steel under the fluorescents—hard and bloodless. He'd spent hours barking orders at my officers, his condescension earning him zero allies in the precinct.
I cornered the Thompson family driver in the hallway. The man had served the family for over a decade, but now he trembled like autumn foliage in a gale.
"The night it happened... Mr. Thompson already knew something had happened to Miss Amy." His eyes fixed on the floor. "Master Jack came home terrified after a phone call. Said he'd only gone to check on her, left before she died. The master suspected something was wrong, but... he still sent Master Jack to the family estate upstate that very night."
Jack had vanished from the estate before dawn.
I returned to the visiting area, now thick with tension. Mei Lin finally broke her silence. Ignoring the prostrate Sarah, she locked eyes with Robert Thompson.
"Donate every asset under your name to children's charities," she said, her quiet voice somehow filling the room. "Every. Last. Penny."
The room went still as vacuum. Robert—who'd been demanding we move heaven and earth to save his son—suddenly clamped his mouth shut. After several heartbeats, his face contorted with indignant rage.
"I will never negotiate with evil!" he thundered, as if he were justice incarnate. He spun on his heel and stormed toward the exit. Sarah lunged after him like a woman possessed, only to be violently shoved aside.
Watching Robert's retreating back, understanding dawned. His son was merely a replaceable asset. His fortune was his true lifeblood.
That night, sirens wailed outside the Thompson mansion. During a hysterical confrontation, Sarah had buried a paring knife in Robert's abdomen. He was rushed to intensive care with severe internal bleeding.
I tasked my partner with a deep dive into Robert's finances. "Go back three generations. I want everything."
Results landed on my desk faster than expected. Bank records showed Robert frantically moving assets for the past week. His business empire was riddled with fraud and tax evasion—the IRS had been building a case against him for months.
As I massaged my temples, trying to make sense of the financial cesspool, the final forensic report arrived.
I paged through dense chemical analyses and molecular breakdowns, but the conclusion was devastatingly simple: apart from the two fingers in that first bun and Amy's dismembered body in the refrigerator, no human tissue was found anywhere in the shop. The meat in the pot, on the cutting board—all ordinary animal protein.
The two fingers, after DNA testing, were confirmed as belonging to Jack Thompson.
My blood crystallized in my veins.
She'd severed Jack's fingers, baked them into those buns, and deliberately served them to a customer guaranteed to contact authorities. Bringing us directly to her door.
Even our involvement had been calculated in her grand design. This woman—this mother—what exactly had she orchestrated?
