Chapter 5 - Forty Feet Below Ground
Richard Hall wore no hard hat. The rain soaked through his silver hair, running down the sharp angles of his face, but he didn't blink.
He held a black umbrella in his left hand, his right hand resting inside his coat pocket.
Tyler shivered violently on his knees in the mud, his cheap sweater soaking through with ice-cold rainwater. "Richard..." he gasped, his teeth chattering. "Richard, thank God! Some guys grabbed me from Leo's house! I don't know who they are—"
Richard took three deliberate steps forward, his leather boots sinking two inches into the wet clay.
"At 1:17 AM," Richard said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion, "my daughter was lying on the floor of her kitchen, bleeding to death."
Tyler’s mouth clamped shut. The lie died in his throat as he looked into Richard’s eyes.
There was no anger in Richard Hall's face. There was no rage.
There was only the absolute, terrifying emptiness of a man who owned everything around him.
"She asked you to call an ambulance," Richard continued softly, stepping closer. "She told you her water had broken. She told you your son was not moving."
"Richard... please," Tyler wept, pressing his forehead against the mud at Richard’s feet. "I panicked! I swear to God, I panicked! We were fighting... she was yelling at me... I didn't mean to hurt her! I loved her!"
Richard looked down at the back of Tyler’s neck.
"You took her phone," Richard said. "You locked her inside the apartment. You walked out while she was screaming for help."
"I was going to call 911 from the street!" Tyler lied frantically, his voice shrill with terror. "I was scared of the police! I knew how it would look! You have to believe me!"
Richard turned his head slightly toward Arthur Vance, who stood three feet away holding a waterproof digital tablet.
"Arthur," Richard said.
"Sir?"
"Who owns the building where Grace lived?"
"Hall Urban Realty Trust," Arthur replied immediately. "Acquired in 2018."
"Who owns the security firm that monitored the street cameras outside her apartment?"
"A subsidiary of Hall Security Systems, sir."
"Who owns the parking garage where Tyler kept his car?"
"Hall Infrastructure Development."
Richard looked back down at Tyler, who was staring up in horrific realization.
"You thought you were hiding from her family, Tyler," Richard said, his voice carrying clearly over the rhythmic rumble of the idling concrete mixers. "You thought you were living in a normal neighborhood, working a normal job, driving on normal streets."
Richard leaned down, his face six inches from Tyler’s trembling, muddy face.
"Every bridge you crossed to visit your family was built by my engineers. Every subway station you stepped into was renovated by my crews. The hospital where my daughter is currently fighting for her life was named after my late wife because I donated forty million dollars for the wing."
Richard straightened up, wiping a drop of rain from his coat lapel.
"You didn't just hit my daughter, Tyler. You tried to murder my grandson inside a city that I built with my bare hands."
"What are you going to do to me?!" Tyler shrieked, looking at the massive, dark foundation wall behind him where fifty tons of wet concrete sat inside a hovering hopper crane. "You can't kill me! The police know I was her husband! They’ll come looking for me!"
Richard smiled. It was a cold, terrible movement of his lips that didn't reach his eyes.
"Kill you?" Richard asked softly. "Tyler, I am a businessman. I don't break the law. The law is something I pay lawyers fifty thousand dollars a week to write."
He gestured toward the access ramp at the top of the pit.
May you like
A black police cruiser, its red and blue lights flashing silently against the concrete walls, drove slowly down the mud ramp, stopping five feet behind Tyler.
Two NYPD detectives stepped out, accompanied by an Assistant District Attorney holding an arrest warrant.
