Page 101 of Crowned in Sin
"The recording is enough," he tells me on the courthouse steps, the second day. "It's more than enough. It ties him to Harry Mitchell's murder, to years of coercing your mother, and to atleast four officers he was running like personal staff. Internal Affairs has had a hard-on for this captain for a decade and didn't have a hook. You handed them the whole fish."
"I didn't hand them anything. Frank did that to himself."
"Sure," he says, in the tone of a man who has learned not to correct a client's grief. "Either way. Give it four, five days."
"That's it? Four days, after everything?"
"Internal Affairs has been sitting on a captain they couldn't touch for ten years. You just handed them motive, murder, and a list of officers on his payroll, in his own voice. They're not going to sit on that. They're going to move fast so nobody above them has time to bury it again."
Four or five days. I've waited longer for a table at a restaurant. It shouldn't feel this heavy, and it does anyway, because Nico is somewhere behind a door I can't get through, wearing someone else's jumpsuit, sleeping in a room he shouldn't be in. I put him there as much as Frank did.
"Tell him something for me," I say. "Tell him I'm working on it."
"He knows you're working on it. That's half of why he's not losing his mind in there."
I don't say that part out loud.
The days blurinto each other in the particular way that waiting does, where nothing changes and everything is different by the time you look up again. I sign things. I answer questions I'vealready answered. I sit in my mother's room at the care facility and hold her hand.
But I don't tell her about the cops who died in her house, because some things don’t need to be carried into her new life.
On the second night, my phone buzzes with a news alert. Local captain named in ongoing corruption probe. I read the first three paragraphs standing barefoot in my kitchen, coffee going cold, and I don't recognize the man they're describing as belonging to the same house I grew up in.
Sources say the investigation now includes an unsolved homicide dating back over a decade.
They don't say dad’s name yet. But in time, they will. I put the phone face down on the counter and don't pick it back up for an hour.
By the third day, the lawyer stops calling with updates and starts calling with confirmations. Four more officers named. Two Internal Affairs interviews already conducted. A department spokesperson stands in front of a microphone and claims irregularities, when what he means is crimes and he doesn't want to get sued for saying so.
"They're not just clearing Nico," the lawyer tells me. "They're gutting the whole case Frank built against him. Church shooting, everything. It was never a real investigation. It was a leash."
"I know what it was."
"Then you know what it means when the leash's owner turns out to be the one who should've been in cuffs the whole time."
I go back to the house exactly once, because someone has to.
Frank kept an office in the back room my mother never used, all dark wood and heavy locked drawers, more furniture than the room could reasonably hold. It smells like his cologne even now, something expensive and cold, and I hate that my body still flinches at it. I go in with a box and a list from the lawyer, documents relevant to the estate, and I tell myself that's the whole reason I'm standing here breathing air that still smells like him.
The desk drawers aren't locked anymore. Nobody's afraid of him anymore.
I go through folder after folder, insurance, deeds, the ordinary paperwork of a man who spent decades pretending to be ordinary. My hands do the work while the rest of me stays somewhere outside the room, watching. And then, near the bottom of the second drawer, under a stack of bank statements he probably never thought anyone would read, I find it.
Power of attorney. My mother's care, her finances, her medical decisions. Already signed.
I sit down on the floor because my legs stop being something I trust.
It's dated to the same time as when I handed over the information about Terminal 7 to him.
He'd already signed it. He'd had it in a drawer the whole time.
He never needed to say no. He just needed me to keep asking.
I don't cry. I want to say that like it's a strength, but it isn't. It's just what happens, my body deciding there isn't room for one more thing today. I sit on the floor of his office with the paper in my lap and I think, so this is what it costs to make someone feellike nothing. Not much. A signature. A drawer. A little patience on his part, watching me beg.
It doesn't change anything. He's dead. The paperwork means nothing now. I already have every authority I need without his name anywhere near it.
That's the worst part, maybe. That it changes nothing and confirms everything.
