Chapter 29 Vivica
Vivica
I’d called the burner fourteen times in two days.
Each time it rang through to a voicemail box that hadn’t been set up.
No answer, no callback, no nothing. Mega had gone silent and silence from a man who was supposed to be my hands on the outside was the most dangerous sound I could hear from behind these walls.
Something had gone wrong. I could feel it the way I’d always felt shifts in power, in my bones, in the tightening of my chest before bad news arrived. Thirty years of running a city teaches you to recognize when the current changes direction. And right now, the current was changing.
I sat across from my attorney, Gerald Whitfield, in the private consultation room that smelled like industrial cleaner and fluorescent lighting.
Gerald was expensive and competent and wore his pessimism like aftershave, which is why I hired him.
I didn’t need a cheerleader. I needed a realist who could find the cracks in the prosecution’s case and drive a truck through them.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Honestly? Better than we were six months ago.” He opened his folder and spread his notes across the table. “The prosecution’s case is built on circumstantial evidence. Blood at the scene, your fingerprints on a knife, the text messages. But they have a significant problem.”
“No body.”
“No body. No confirmed cause of death. No witnesses. No murder weapon with DNA other than your fingerprints, which you can explain away through the nature of your relationship with the victim. You lived together intermittently. Of course your prints are on household items.” He clicked his pen.
“And without a body, they can’t prove she’s dead.
For all they know, India Coleman walked away from that apartment on her own two feet. ”
“Which she did,” I said. Because that was the truth.
I didn’t kill India. I didn’t know where she was or what happened to her after that night, but I knew I hadn’t killed her.
My sons had staged this entire thing and dropped me in a cage for a crime that never happened.
The blood was real but the murder was not.
India was alive somewhere and my children had made sure I couldn’t prove it.
“Have your people been able to locate her?” I asked.
“No. We’ve run searches domestically and internationally.
No passport activity, no credit card usage under her name, no social media presence.
Wherever she is, someone has gone to great lengths to make her disappear.
If we could produce her alive, the case collapses overnight. But right now she’s a ghost.”
“Keep looking.”
“We will. In the meantime, I’m filing a motion to dismiss based on insufficient evidence. Judge Harmon is sympathetic to procedural arguments. I think we have a real shot.”
A real shot. A year of rotting in this facility and those were the words he offered me.
A real shot. As if Vivica Banks had ever settled for a shot when she could guarantee the outcome.
But I was behind bars and my assets were frozen and my children had turned on me and the man I’d hired to execute my plans from the outside had stopped answering his phone. A shot was all I had left.
“Thank you, Gerald. Keep me updated.”
He gathered his papers and left and I sat in the consultation room alone for a few minutes because the guards let me.
They let me do a lot of things because even in a jumpsuit, some women carry authority that uniforms can’t strip away.
I wasn’t the mayor anymore but I was still Vivica Banks.
And Vivica Banks didn’t beg for extra time in a room.
She simply took it and dared someone to object.
Later that afternoon, I got a visitor I wasn’t expecting.
Dante walked into the visitation room looking like he’d been dragged down a flight of stairs. His left eye was swollen, his lip was split, and he was holding his ribs like at least one of them was cracked. He sat across from me and couldn’t meet my eyes.
“What happened to you?” I asked even though I already knew.
“Quest.” He said the name like it tasted sour in his mouth. “He came to my house looking for Serenity. He knows about Mega, Vivica. He knows I helped set her up. He beat me until I passed out and when I woke up they were gone.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
“I told him I didn’t know where Mega took her. Because I don’t.”
“Did you tell him about me?”
“No. I swear I didn’t. But Vivica, it’s only a matter of time. If Mega talks, and he will talk because that boy is weak, Quest is going to find out everything. The Vipers, the warehouse, the casino, all of it traces back to you.”
I looked at this man I’d once been married to. This soft, frightened, obedient man who did what I told him because he’d never learned how to do anything else. He’d been useful for a season. That season was ending.
“I need you to do one more thing for me,” I said.
“Vivica, I can’t. They’re watching me now. If Quest finds out I’m still helping you, he’ll kill me. He’s not playing anymore.”
“Quest has been playing his entire life. He just doesn’t know who taught him the game.” I leaned forward. “I need you to get in contact with someone. Her name is Farah. She’s Rashid’s daughter.”
Dante’s face went pale. “Rashid? As in the Rashid…Shadow? Vivica, that family is…”
“I know exactly what that family is. That’s why I need her. Now go find her and tell her Vivica Banks wants to have a conversation. Tell her it’s about the people who destroyed her father. She’ll know what that means.”
Dante stared at me for a long time. Then he stood, pushed the chair back, and left without saying goodbye. He’d do it. He always did what I told him. That was the one quality that had survived our marriage.
I sat in the visitation room, folded my hands on the table, and thought about the board.
Mega was compromised. My sons were closing in.
Gerald was filing motions. India was a ghost. And somewhere out there, Rashid’s daughter was carrying a grudge heavy enough to burn down everything the Banks brothers had built.
All she needed was a match. And I was very good with fire.