…he will expedite the collection process with extreme prejudice. “Can you plant that rumor in the underworld?” I asked softly.
“Already done,” Dick confirmed. “But Nate, Curtis won’t just ask nicely. If Walter can’t pay, Curtis sends collectors to the family. He’ll target Walter’s ex-wife, Barbara. Are you prepared for the collateral damage?”
Chapter 4: Controlled Demolition
I didn’t blink. “Barbara placed a wager while Jamie gasped for oxygen. Let the collectors knock on her door.”
The ensuing weeks resembled a perfectly orchestrated sequence of synchronized detonations. I watched from an untouchable distance as my former family tore themselves apart in a desperate bid for survival.
Dick’s underworld whispers reached Curtis the Snake within forty-eight hours. Enraged by the prospect of losing his capital to government asset forfeiture, Curtis dispatched two heavily armed collectors to Barbara Mills’s residence. The intimidation tactic terrified her to her core. Desperate to sever herself from Walter’s lethal debts, Barbara rushed to the courthouse and filed a restraining order against her ex-husband, legally documenting that his illicit activities were endangering her life.
With the family matriarch actively legally barring the patriarch, the structural integrity of the Hamilton clan plummeted.
Next was Wade, drowning in child-support arrears and terrified of his impending trial. One of my attorney’s paralegals ‘accidentally’ leaked a legal theory to Wade’s desperate public defender: Sue Walter. If Wade filed a civil lawsuit against his own father for ‘intentional infliction of emotional distress and coercion’, he could potentially argue he was a victim of Walter’s manipulation, while simultaneously targeting whatever equity Walter had left.
Wade, spineless and greedy, took the bait. He sued his own father.
Walter Hamilton, watching his ex-wife secure a restraining order against him, his son sue him, and his daughter Chelsea testify against him, lost whatever tenuous grip he had on his sanity. Stripped of his narcissistic authority, he violated Barbara’s restraining order in a drunken, screaming rage on her front lawn.
The police arrested him immediately. The judge revoked his bail. Walter was thrown back into the county lockup, trapped in a cage while his empire crumbled.
I didn’t stop there. I instructed Dick to release the Kraken on the peripheral participants.
We anonymously mailed irrefutable photographic evidence of Les Murphy’s eight-month extramarital affair to Chelsea. Chelsea, already ostracized by her family and spiraling into a nervous breakdown, initiated a spectacular, police-involved domestic dispute that ended with Les moving out. Distracted and emotionally ruined, Chelsea made a sloppy accounting error at her bank, exposing her own embezzlement without me having to lift a finger. She was terminated and faced internal investigation.
Sonia Wheeler Hamilton’s employer received an anonymous, meticulously documented package detailing her opioid prescription fraud. She was fired within three days.
Austin and Marlene Hamilton, the cowardly accomplices, found their college administrators and employers inundated with anonymous tips and public social media campaigns exposing their role in the child abuse scandal. They were expelled and terminated, respectively, forced to flee their apartments due to localized outrage.
By the time the September trial commenced under the stern gavel of Judge Connie Benjamin, the nine defendants were entirely broken, bankrupt, and isolated. They sat at the defense tables not as a unified family, but as a fractured collective of bitter enemies.
Assistant DA Tyrone Monroe orchestrated a masterclass in prosecution. The fifty-one-minute video of Jamie’s suffocation played in agonizing, high-definition silence to a weeping jury. Chelsea’s testimony nailed the coffin shut, circumventing the defense’s pathetic attempts to claim it was a misunderstood disciplinary tactic.
After three grueling weeks, the jury deliberated for a mere four hours.
The foreman read the verdicts. Guilty on all charges.
Walter Hamilton: Fifty years. Miranda Mullen: Forty years. Wade Hamilton: Thirty-five years.
I sat in the gallery, my expression carved from granite. As the bailiffs shackled Miranda, she finally cast her gaze toward me. Her eyes were hollow, searching my face for a flicker of the man she had married. She found nothing but an architect evaluating a completed demolition site.
The legal system had exacted its toll. But as I walked out into the crisp autumn air, I knew the concrete walls of a state penitentiary were too sterile. They offered shelter, three meals a day, and routine. That was a punishment, but it was not retribution. I needed them to comprehend the exact, suffocating terror my son had felt beneath the soil.
