The chilling words echoed through my tactical headphones and paralyzed the air in the hotel room. Brittany pacing nervously in front of my fireplace asking if the gas leak would look like an accident when I got back from the base. The sheer magnitude of their depravity crashed over me like a physical shockwave. Derek had not orchestrated the living room ambush just to evict me and steal custody of Lily.
That confrontation was a frantic improvised backup plan. My original military transport flight had been rescheduled at the last minute bringing me home a full twenty four hours earlier than expected. If I had arrived on my original timeline I would have walked into an empty house filled with dangerously concentrated natural gas. One spark from a light switch and my daughter and I would have been unlikely to survive.
Derek was trying to take a life me to collect the five million dollar military life insurance policy that pays out directly to the surviving spouse. He needed that payout to erase his massive margin debt and fund his escape to the Cayman Islands. I pulled the headphones from my ears and looked at DeAndre. He had heard it too.
His eyes were wide with a terror that transcended any financial fraud he had ever audited. He reached for his mobile phone telling me we needed to dial emergency services immediately and send the police to arrest them for conspiracy to cause a fatal incident. I grabbed his wrist and stopped him. My intelligence training suppressed the primal urge to panic.
I told DeAndre that calling the police right now would be a tactical error. Derek had millions of dollars to hire elite defense attorneys. He would claim the audio was out of context or throw Brittany under the bus and say she was acting alone. We needed to lock him into a corner where he could not lie his way out.
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