Chapter 3 - The Interrogation of Derek Voss
The federal holding facility beneath the federal courthouse smelled of ozone, bleach, and unyielding fluorescent light.
I sat on the opposite side of the steel interrogation table, still wearing my civilian hospital recovery clothes, though a military fleece jacket was draped over my shoulders. Across from me sat Derek. His designer navy shirt was wrinkled, his hair was messy, and the smug, arrogant aura that had defined him in my maternity room had completely evaporated, replaced by a desperate, sweaty panic.
Two federal agents stood near the heavy one-way mirror behind him.
"You can't do this, Mara," Derek stammered, his hands cuffed to the steel loop bolted into the center of the table. He pulled against the restraints, rattling them frantically. "We’re married! We have a child! You can't use military tribunal powers against your own husband in a civil matter!"
"Civil matter?" I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the table. "Derek, you didn't just cheat on me. You didn't just lock me out in the rain while I was in active labor. You used my name to open three corporate shell accounts in the Cayman Islands, routing over four million dollars of classified defense contractor relief funds through a shell company registered under your consulting firm's tax ID."
Derek’s breath hitched. "That... that was supposed to be untraceable. Elise said her contacts—"
"Elise is an intelligence officer who couldn't pass a basic counter-intel screening without forging her security clearance renewals," I stated flatly. "She thought she was using you to access my family trust. What she didn't realize was that my grandfather's twenty-two-million-dollar trust was a honey-pot account monitored directly by the Department of the Treasury."
He stared at me, his eyes wide, the realization finally breaking through his dense layers of entitlement. "A honey-pot... you set me up?"
"I didn't have to set you up, Derek. I simply left the cookie jar open and watched to see how fast you’d reach inside." I pulled a thick manila folder from beneath my jacket and dropped it onto the table. "These are your text messages with Elise dating back fourteen months. Every plan to isolate me, every conversation about faking my medical instability for the custody filing, every digital signature you forged on my medical proxy forms while I was carrying our child."
He looked down at the papers, his hands trembling violently. "Mara... please. We can fix this. Drop the federal charges. We can go to counseling. We can co-parent Evelyn. I was stressed! The business was failing, the market crashed—I made a mistake!"
"A mistake is forgetting to pick up milk on the way home, Derek," I said, my voice dropping an octave, carrying the iron weight of every deployment, every hard decision, and every betrayal I had survived. "What you did was calculated, malicious, and executed with the deliberate intention of destroying me, stripping me of my child, and stealing my inheritance while I was physically vulnerable."
The door behind Derek clicked open. Director Vance stepped into the room, holding a secure tablet.
"Colonel Ellison," Vance said, nodding respectfully. "We’ve completed the raid on the downtown condo. We found the physical copies of the forged trust transfer documents, along with the jewelry and heirlooms your husband and Major Carver stole from your home safe over the past year."
Vance looked down at Derek. "Including the late Colonel Katherine Ellison's military valor cross, which you tried to pawn yesterday afternoon."
Derek flinched, shrinking back into his chair. "I needed liquidity..."
"You need a defense attorney who specializes in federal treason statutes," Vance corrected coldly. "Major Carver has already started talking. She signed a full cooperation agreement thirty minutes ago, throwing you under every available bus in the district. She admitted that you were the mastermind behind the plan to force your wife into a psychiatric hold so you could seize total control of the twenty-two-million-dollar trust before the birth certificate was filed."
Derek looked back at me, tears welling in his eyes—tears of self-pity, not remorse. "Mara... please. Look at me. We were happy once. Remember the trip to Napa? Remember our wedding?"
"Our wedding," I said quietly, standing up from the table, "was the day I made the worst tactical error of my life: I underestimated how small a man could become when he is consumed by greed."
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I buttoned my fleece jacket, looking down at him one last time.
"Enjoy your accommodations, Mr. Voss. You’ll have plenty of time to contemplate the free market from a six-by-eight concrete cell."
