Chapter 6 - THE CONFESSION IN CELL 4
By midnight, the Savannah Police Headquarters was lit up like a Christmas tree. Federal agents from the FBI and the IRS had flooded the third floor, taking over the investigation as the true scope of Senator Sterling’s laundering network became clear.
I sat in a small interrogation room on the ground floor.
Across the steel table sat Mason. He was wearing an orange orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed together at his waist. He looked smaller, broken, his shoulders slumped as if the weight of his choices was physically crushing his spine.
"How is Lucas?" Mason asked softly, his voice trembling.
"He's asleep," I said, keeping my hands folded on the table. "The doctors say there will be no permanent neurological damage from the paralytic. He was lucky."
Mason buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders heaving with silent sobs. "Dad... I swear to God... I didn't know she was going to give him that injection. She told me it was just a mild sedative... just enough to make him sleep so you wouldn't ask questions while we went to clean out Walter's office."
"A mild sedative?" I stared at my son with cold disappointment. "You allowed your wife to give an untested chemical to your six-month-old child just so you could go destroy evidence of a crime?"
"I was terrified!" Mason cried out, raising his red-rimmed eyes. "Sterling told me that if Walter spoke to the grand jury, our company would be seized! We would lose the house, the cars, everything! Vanessa said... she said if we didn't fix this, her father would make sure I took all the blame!"
"And so you decided to frame your own father instead?"
Mason flinched as if I had struck him across the face. "Vanessa set up the camera loop on your server... she said if the police suspected you for a few days, it would buy us enough time to get to the airstrip in Brunswick. She promised me nobody would actually prosecute you... she said your age and your reputation would get the charges dropped eventually!"
"You listened to a monster, Mason," I said, leaning forward. "And in doing so, you became one."
"Dad, please..." Mason reached across the table, his handcuffs clanking against the metal surface. "Help me. Talk to the prosecutor. Tell them I cooperated! Tell them I was tricked!"
I looked at my son—the boy I had taught to throw a baseball, the boy I had stayed up with through feverish nights when he was a toddler, the young man I had watched proudly at his college graduation.
"I will hire a defense attorney for you," I said slowly, every word tasting like ash in my mouth. "I will make sure you receive a fair trial under the law. But I will not lie for you. You will face the consequences of what you did to your son, and what you allowed to happen to Walter Higgins."
"Dad... please don't abandon me," he wept.
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"I didn't abandon you, Mason," I said, standing up from the chair. "You abandoned Lucas the moment you traded his life for a seat at Richard Sterling's table."
I turned my back on him and walked out of the interrogation room, ignoring his desperate cries behind the heavy steel door.
