Chapter 14 - The Cell Visit
The visitor booth at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago was separated by thick, scratched Plexiglas that smelled of industrial floor stripper.
I didn't want to go.
Shawn had asked me to come with him. Not because he wanted to defend his sister, but because he needed me to be the anchor that kept him from sinking back into thirty years of psychological conditioning.
When the heavy steel door on the inmate side clicked open, Olivia shuffled in.
She was wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit that swallowed her thin frame. Her wrists were secured to a belly chain, her ankles hobbled by steel leg irons. The transformation was shocking. Without her salon blowouts, her manicured nails, and her designer sunglasses, she looked twenty years older. Hollow. Shrunken. Defeated.
She sat down heavily on the steel stool, lifting the heavy plastic telephone receiver with her shackled hands.
Shawn picked up his receiver on our side. I sat beside him, leaning close so I could hear her voice through the earpiece.
“Shawn,” Olivia croaked. Her voice was cracked, devoid of any of its previous melodic arrogance. “Thank God. You have to get Mom to mortgage the Lake house. Pendelton says the federal public defender doesn't understand the real estate portfolio. I need a private trial team.”
Shawn didn't answer immediately. He looked at her through the scratched glass. He looked at the woman who had terrorized his home, stolen his daughter’s future, and framed him for felony fraud.
“Shawn?” Olivia’s voice rose, a sharp edge of panic returning. “Did you hear me? Derek is talking to the feds! That bastard is rolling on me! He’s trying to say the whole Delaware structure was my idea! You have to tell the prosecutors that you managed the Blue Harbor LLC! If you tell them it was your investment company, they can’t prove interstate fraud!”
Shawn let out a long, slow breath.
“You still want me to take the fall,” Shawn said, his voice eerily calm.
Olivia froze. “It’s not taking the fall! You have clean records, Shawn! You have a family! They won’t give you prison time, they’ll give you probation and community service! If I get convicted, I’m looking at fifteen years!”
“You are looking at twenty,” Shawn corrected her coldly. “Marcus walked us through the sentencing guidelines yesterday. And Anthony handed over the audio recordings from your home office computer.”
Olivia’s eyes widened in sheer horror. “What audio recordings?”
“Anthony’s security system records digital audio in his study whenever the motion sensors are tripped,” Shawn said. “They have you and Langley on tape from February. Talking about how you were going to leave Tony destitute. Talking about how you were going to use my name to wash the escrow funds because I was ‘too stupid to check my own bank returns.’”
Olivia went dead white. Her mouth worked soundlessly for three seconds.
“Shawn… please,” she whispered, tears cutting clean streaks through the gray grime on her cheeks. “I’m your sister. We survived Dad together. We survived Mom together. You can’t leave me in here.”
“You left me a long time ago, Liv,” Shawn said. His voice was thick with emotion, but there was no hesitation left in him. “You stopped being my sister the day you forged Dad’s signature on those bonds. And you died to me the second you hammered on my daughter’s car window.”
“Shawn!” she shrieked, slamming her shackled hands against the glass. The steel chain clattered violently against the partition. “Don’t you hang up that phone! Shawn!”
A guard immediately stepped forward, grabbing Olivia’s shoulder and pulling her back from the stool.
Shawn looked at her through the glass for one final second.
“Goodbye, Olivia.”
He hung the heavy black plastic receiver back onto its metal cradle.
May you like
He didn't look back as we walked toward the heavy security airlock. He took my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and kept his head high as the steel doors buzzed open to let us back into the free world.
***
