Chapter 7 - The Interrogation in Federal Holding
At 10:00 A.M. the following Tuesday, inside the subterranean maximum-security interview suite of the San Diego Central Detention Facility in downtown San Diego, sixty-two-year-old Corrine Sterling sat handcuffed to a stainless-steel table.
She wore a drab, oversized orange corrections jumpsuit, having spent five days in pretrial detention after her bail was revoked following federal grand jury indictments.
Her dyed blonde hair was unwashed, tangled, and graying at the roots, her face sallow and hollow under the buzzing fluorescent tubes, her hands shaking in constant, rhythmic tremors. Stripped of her country club designer wardrobe, her diamond rings, her stolen millions, and her manufactured maternal arrogance, she looked like a broken, hollow shell of a woman.
Sitting on the other side of the glass partition, weeping hysterically in an identical orange jumpsuit, was Sloan Sterling. Her acrylic nails were bitten to the quick, her face swollen from days of continuous crying.
The heavy steel security door buzzed and clicked open.
Stepping into the room, dressed in an immaculate bespoke three-piece charcoal Italian wool suit, his six-foot-two frame casting a dark, terrifying shadow across the room, was myself, Thane Sterling.
Beside me walked eighty-year-old Arthur Vance Senior, his silver-headed walking cane striking the concrete floor with chilling finality:
CLACK. CLACK.
Corrine and Sloan looked up, their bloodshot eyes widening with desperate, pathetic hope as they leaned across the cold steel table.
"Thane...?! Arthur, thank God!" Corrine choked out, her voice cracking into raw, sniveling whimpers. "Did you talk to the United States Attorney?! Did you tell them that it was all an internal family dispute?! Sloan made me do it, Thane! Sloan owed money to those Chinese gamblers! She told me they were going to break her legs if we didn't get the deeds! You have to get me out of here, Thane! The women in this cellblock... they know what I did to Alora! I can't survive in this cage!"
Sloan wailed, clawing at the partition: "Mom! You lying monster! You told me Thane was giving everything to Alora! You handed me the sledgehammer! You told me to hit the safe until the lock broke!"
"SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!" Arthur Vance Seniorâs booming baritone roared through the interrogation suite like an artillery shell.
The room fell into dead, suffocating silence.
Arthur stepped forward, sliding a single legal document across the stainless steel.
"Corrine Sterling and Sloan Sterling," Arthur spoke, his deep baritone rolling off the cinderblock walls like an executionerâs drumbeat. "Under the Universal Lineal Disinheritance and Civil Asset Forfeiture Decree signed yesterday by Chief District Judge Eleanor Bradley, your names have been permanently excised from all family, civic, and corporate registries."
Arthur pointed to the document.
"You have zero claim to the Sterling estate. You have zero claim to the maritime trust. You leave this family with precisely zero dollars, zero assets, and thirty-seven million dollars in non-dischargeable federal restitution debt."
Corrine stared at the paper, her hands trembling so violently that the steel handcuffs rattled against the anchor ring.
"And Alora...?" Corrine whispered, her voice barely audible. "Does my daughter-in-law have any message for me?"
I looked down at her for the last time in my life.
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"Alora had only one message, Corrine," I said quietly, turning toward the heavy steel door. "She told me to remind you that a mother who pulls her pregnant daughter-in-law's hair at 2 A.M. doesn't have a family... she has a prison sentence."
The steel door opened with a heavy magnetic clunk, and Arthur and I walked out into the corridor, leaving the prisoners' broken wails to echo uselessly against the concrete walls.
