They placed bets. When the aircraft finally hit the Richmond tarmac shortly before midnight, I bypassed baggage claim and chartered a car directly to the Children’s Hospital of Richmond.
Perry was slumped in the pediatric ward’s sterile waiting area, looking a decade older. When he spotted me, he shot to his feet. I bypassed formalities and pulled the man into a crushing embrace. He was the sole reason I was not currently identifying a tiny corpse.
“I heard laughing,” Perry choked out, his voice cracking. “I thought you were hosting a barbecue. Then I heard the screaming. What kind of people do that to a child?”
“The kind who don’t get to walk away,” I promised in a low whisper.
Perry leaned back, searching my eyes. “Nate, I know that look. I’m a public defender. I know how the system operates. Do not do anything stupid. The law will handle them.”
“Will it?” I countered, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached.
Before Perry could deliver a lecture on due process, Dr. Melvin Dunlap, a pediatric trauma specialist, emerged. He escorted me to a private recovery room.
My son looked impossibly small, dwarfed by the mechanical hum of monitors and an IV taped to his bruised hand. Abrasions marred his cheeks. When his exhausted eyes found mine, his face crumpled into absolute devastation.
“Daddy,” he sobbed.
I crossed the linoleum in three massive strides, gathering his fragile form against my chest. “I’ve got you,” I murmured fiercely into his hair. “I’m right here. Nobody is ever going to touch you again.”
“I’m sorry,” Jamie hiccuped, clutching my collar. “I tried to be good, but Grandpa said I was bad. He said I needed a lesson.”
“You did absolutely nothing wrong,” I commanded gently, ensuring he heard the absolute conviction in my tone. “Your grandfather is a monster. Your mother is a monster. I will never let them near you again.”
After Jamie finally drifted into a chemically assisted, restless slumber, I met with Renee Collins, an astutely observant social worker. We discussed safety protocols, immediate divorce filings, and restraining orders. She gently probed to see if I had ignored previous warning signs.
The sickening guilt washed over me. The locked doors. The flinching. The drawing of the family ‘playing a game’. I had been so obsessed with erecting skyscrapers and securing legacy contracts that I had missed the structural decay rotting within my own home.
I stepped out into the quiet hospital corridor and dialed Dick. “Tell me you have something.”
“I have the blueprints to a slaughterhouse,” Dick replied, his keyboard clacking rhythmically in the background. “Your father-in-law, Walter? He’s got a sealed juvenile file. I bribed a contact. When Walter was fifteen, he and two buddies tortured a neighborhood dog. Buried it alive in the woods. Furthermore, he’s drowning in seventy thousand dollars of illegal gambling debt to a connected bookie.”
My pulse throbbed in my temples. “And Miranda?”
“Expelled from her first university before she met you. Also sealed. She tortured a dorm-mate’s cat to death. Her wealthy parents paid to make it vanish. You’re dealing with serial sadists, Nate. It’s an escalating pattern.”
“What about the sister? Chelsea?”
“Embezzling from the bank where she works,” Dick confirmed with a dark chuckle. “Not a fortune, but a slow bleed of nine grand over eighteen months. It’s felony territory. She’s leaving a digital paper trail a mile wide.”
I stared at the pristine white walls of the hospital. An architect knows that a building doesn’t fall by attacking the strongest pillar first. You target the weakest load-bearing joint. You introduce a fracture.
“Get me the irrefutable proof on Chelsea,” I ordered. “I am going to use her to shatter the family’s unified front.”
