Part 3
The police did not arrive in a dramatic flurry of sirens, but rather with the quiet, devastating efficiency of a scheduled appointment.
Twenty minutes after Daniel’s voice finished playing the first recording, two uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective from the municipal financial crimes division walked through the heavy oak doors of the chapel. They didn’t look at the mahogany casket. They didn’t offer condolences to the weeping mourners or the stunned relatives.
They walked straight up to Grant.
“Grant Sterling?” the lead detective asked, flipping open a small leather notebook. “And Vivian Sterling?”
Grant’s face drained of whatever color had managed to return to it. He looked wildly around the room, as if expecting his business associates, his country club friends, or his extended family to stand up and form a human shield around him. But the pews behind him were emptying fast. Cousins, uncles, and lifelong family friends were sliding out into the side aisles, desperate to put as much physical distance between themselves and the crumbling Sterling name as humanly possible.
