Chapter 8 - The Frozen Accounts of Brenda Vance
By noon, the financial empire of lies Brenda had fabricated completely imploded.
Sitting in a concrete holding cell at the St. Louis Justice Center, dressed in an orange inmate jumpsuit, Brenda was visited by her court-appointed public defender.
“What about my bail?” Brenda sobbed, gripping the mesh wire partition. “My mother has sixty thousand dollars in her savings account! Tell her to post the bond!”
The public defender shook his head with grim finality. “Your mother’s accounts have been frozen under federal forfeiture orders. The Department of Justice is auditing every transaction from the past three years.”
He laid out the financial audit report:
The $18,400 siphoned from Evelyn’s pension was seized directly from Brenda’s checking account.
The state revoked Brenda's professional cosmetology license for operating an unlicensed cosmetic clinic using stolen pharmaceutical products.
The district attorney confirmed they were seeking a mandatory minimum sentence of twelve years in the state penitentiary without the possibility of early parole.
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Brenda buried her face in her shackled hands, wailing in bitter, irreversible despair.
The money she had hoarded, the luxury clothes she had flaunted, and the arrogance she had used to humiliate me at Gate B8 had bought her nothing but an iron cage and a decade of cold concrete.
