Chapter 9 - The Arrests
Demi Benedict was taken into custody that afternoon at an upscale spa downtown, reclining in a heated chair with a cool green mask drying on her face, when two detectives and a uniformed officer walked into the treatment room.
“This is a mistake,” she said, and then, as they asked her to stand and put her hands behind her back, louder, the mask cracking as her expression changed.
“This is an outrageous mistake, do you know who I am, my attorneys will have every one of you fired—”
“Demi Benedict,” the lead detective said, “you’re under arrest for murder in the first degree, criminal conspiracy, and solicitation of aggravated assault.”
He read her the rest of it while the aesthetician backed against the wall with a towel pressed to her mouth, and Demi kept talking, kept threatening, kept insisting, all the way out through the lobby and into the daylight.
Gareth was picked up an hour later at his gym. He saw the unmarked cars in the lot through the front glass and went out the back, straight into two state troopers who had been standing in the delivery alley for twenty minutes waiting for exactly that.
In his office locker they found eighteen thousand dollars in banded cash and a manila folder that contained, in neat detail, Brandon’s home address, his mother’s name and workplace, and a printed copy of Sierra’s clinic schedule.
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Faced with the phone, the money, the folder, and the threat message on Henderson’s device, the two men who had beaten Brandon in the alley did what men like that almost always do.
They flipped. Within a day both had lawyers negotiating cooperation, and both had confirmed the same story: Gareth had paid them ten thousand dollars to put Brandon in the hospital and frighten him into signing away the estate, and had told them, in as many words, that if Brandon still refused, they were to take the sister.
