Chapter 8 - The Grand Jury
Six months later, the marble corridors of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan were cold enough to see your breath.
I wore a dark gray wool suit I had purchased with my own money—money earned from my new job coordinating intake services at a legal aid clinic in Brooklyn. My hair was pulled back into a neat, simple bun, revealing the faint, pale line along my left cheek where the flagstone patio had cut through the flesh. The scar was small, no larger than a sewing needle, but I had refused the plastic surgeon the government’s victim assistance fund had offered to provide.
I wanted it there. It was my receipt.
The corridor was packed with reporters, sketch artists, and twenty-five off-duty NYPD officers who stood in a silent, stony phalanx near the elevators, their arms crossed over their chests, their eyes tracking my every movement with absolute, concentrated hatred.
They had come to show support for the "Conner Legacy."
When Mark stepped off the prisoner transport elevator, he wasn't wearing his midnight-blue suit. He wore an orange jumpsuit with the letters **MDC BROOKLYN** stenciled across the back in black block letters. His wrists were handcuffed to a heavy belly chain, his ankles shackled so closely together that he had to take short, shuffling steps like an old man navigating an icy sidewalk.
His handsome face was gone. The golden boy had lost twenty-five pounds in the federal detention center; his cheekbones were hollow, his skin gray and mottled under the fluorescent tubes, his hair chopped short by a prison barber with dull shears.
He looked at me as he shuffled past.
For six months, I had wondered what that look would feel like. I had thought it would terrify me, or make me want to scream, or send me running into the ladies' room to vomit.
Instead, when our eyes met, I felt nothing.
Not hatred. Not anger. Not even pity. He was simply a stranger who had shared a breakfast table with me twenty years ago—a small, weak, violent boy who had finally run out of men to hide behind.
Mark opened his mouth, his lips moving as if to speak, but the two United States Marshals flanking him gave his chain a sharp, businesslike tug that propelled him forward into the courtroom before a single sound could escape.
Charles didn't even look up when they brought him out fifteen minutes later.
The former deputy inspector had aged ten years since July. He walked with a heavy limp, his eyes fixed on the terrazzo floor, his thick shoulders hunched forward as though he were trying to disappear inside his orange jumpsuit. His Colt Python had been entered into evidence as Exhibit 42-A; his house on Whispering Pines had been seized under federal civil forfeiture laws; his pension had been stripped by an emergency order of the state comptroller’s office.
Everything he had built—every dollar, every secret, every lie he had told to keep that gold shield polished—had been liquidated to pay the federal restitution fund.
"Ms. Conner?"
I turned. A woman in her mid-fifties was standing behind me, wearing a simple black coat and holding a laminated photograph of an eighteen-year-old boy with a brilliant, wide smile and a graduation cap perched on his dark curls.
Mrs. Diaz.
She didn't speak English well, and my Spanish was rusty from my teaching days, but she didn't need words. She reached out with two small, work-hardened hands and took mine, pressing them between her palms.
Her hands were warm. They smelled of cocoa butter and church candles.
"Gracias," she whispered, her eyes filling with tears that didn't spill. "Gracias, hija."
"I'm sorry," I said, my voice catching for the first time all morning. "I'm so sorry it took six years."
May you like
She shook her head, pressed the photograph against my knuckles, and leaned up to kiss the scarred skin of my left cheek. "Now he sleeps," she said softly. "Now my Julian sleeps."
***
