Chapter 8 - The Severing of the Past
Three months passed.
The freezing winter winds of January had swept across Lake Michigan, encasing the piers and drawbridges of Chicago in a glittering armor of white ice.
Inside Courtroom 6B of the Dirksen Federal Building, the air was warm, smelling of polished oak, wool coats, and the heavy, final scent of judicial retribution.
The gallery was packed with federal prosecutors, investigative reporters, and the surviving family members of Arthur Higgins.
At the defense table sat Julian Cross and Marcus Vance.
They wore matching coarse orange federal jumpsuits, their hands and feet shackled by heavy steel belly-chains that clanked against the linoleum whenever they shifted. Vance’s silver-dusted hair had been roughly shaved to the scalp; his face was gaunt, his eyes sunken and vacant like an empty house. Julian looked completely dismantled—shivering uncontrollably, his teeth clicking, staring down at the wooden table with the hollow, defeated gaze of a man who had already spent ninety days in solitary confinement.
I sat in the front row of the gallery, wearing a tailored charcoal wool suit, my arms resting calmly over the back of the polished wooden bench.
Judge Evelyn Harrison—the formidable federal magistrate who had presided over the trial—adjusted her reading glasses, looking down from the bench with cold, absolute disgust.
"Julian Cross and Marcus Vance," Judge Harrison said, her voice cutting through the silent courtroom like a guillotine blade. "You took an oath to this community—one as a sworn officer of the law, the other as a trusted corporate fiduciary. You betrayed that oath with a level of sociopathic calculation that this court has rarely seen in thirty years on the federal bench."
She banged her heavy wooden gavel onto the sounding block with a concussive CRACK.
"On Count One: First-degree murder during the commission of a federal bank robbery. You are each sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, to be served at the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado."
CRACK.
"On Counts Two through Fourteen: Civil rights conspiracy, aggravated evidence tampering, and federal wire fraud. An additional consecutive sentence of forty years."
Julian let out a raw, broken sob, his forehead slamming down against the defense table, his chains rattling violently as two federal marshals stepped behind his chair to haul him upright.
Vance didn't scream. He simply closed his eyes, a single tear cutting a clean path through the gray grime on his hollow cheek, realizing that the concrete walls of Florence ADX would be the only sky he would ever see again.
As the marshals dragged the two convicts toward the reinforced steel holding cell doors, Julian lifted his head.
His eyes found mine in the front row.
In that look, there was no arrogance left. No patronizing partnership. There was only the bottomless, terrifying comprehension that the man he had tried to step on had instead orchestrated his absolute, eternal destruction.
I didn't flinch. I didn't sneer.
May you like
I simply held his gaze, lifted my right hand, and touched the clean silver cufflink on my sleeve—the cufflink Julian had tried to claim as evidence of my guilt eight years ago.
Julian choked on a wail, his knees giving out as the marshals dragged his limp, shackled frame through the heavy steel security doors, sealing him into the dark forever.
