Part 5
Chapter 5
A state trooper moved behind him instantly, wrenching his arms behind his back and snapping cold steel handcuffs around the very wrists that had abused so many vulnerable victims.
"You can't do this to me!" Landry shouted, struggling against the restraint. "I run this district! I have political connections throughout the entire county commissioner's office!"
"Your political patrons are currently being served with grand jury subpoenas at their residences, Captain," Agent Vance answered coldly as he secured the double-locked mechanism on the cuffs.
Brooke scrambled backward, attempting to slip down the hallway toward the rear emergency exit, but a female state trooper blocked the doorway with her arms crossed firmly.
"Where do you think you're heading, Mrs. Vance?" the trooper asked, her expression unyielding as she guided Brooke back toward the center of the illuminated precinct lobby.
"Arthur, save me!" Brooke shrieked, bursting into hysterical tears as the reality of prison bars crept over her arrogant mind. "Tell them she's crazy! Tell them anything!"
Arthur buried his face in his hands and sank onto the bench where our bruised mother had been handcuffed just half an hour ago. He looked utterly broken and hollow.
"I can't lie anymore, Brooke," Arthur sobbed through his fingers. "Clara knows. She's always known everything. We shouldn't have listened to your uncle's crooked scheme."
"You coward!" Brooke screamed, spitting toward her husband as the state trooper fastened handcuffs around her slender wrists. "You worthless, pathetic excuse for a husband!"
I turned my back on their pathetic squabbling and walked toward the medical examination room where the paramedics had finished stabilizing my mother's fractured wrist and lacerated scalp.
Helena was sitting up on the gurney, a warm thermal blanket wrapped around her frail shoulders. Her left eye was swollen purple, but her gaze was lucid and fierce.
"Clara..." she whispered, extending her uninjured hand toward me. Her fingers trembled with lingering shock, yet her grip was surprisingly tight when our palms finally met.
"I'm right here, Mom," I said gently, kneeling beside the gurney so we were at eye level. "It's over now. No one in this town will ever hurt you again."
Tears spilled down Helena's battered cheeks, washing away small streaks of dried blood. "He was my boy, Clara. I raised Arthur with love. How could he watch them do that?"
"Greed rots weak minds, Mom," I said softly, kissing her bruised knuckles. "They wanted your house deed and the savings account Dad left behind before he passed away."
Helena nodded slowly, closing her eyes as a fresh wave of grief washed over her. "Brooke brought the papers at midnight. She demanded I sign the deed over immediately."
"And when you refused, she called Captain Landry over to intimidate you," I finished the sequence for her, piecing together the timeline with absolute forensic clarity.
"He told me if I didn't sign, they would commit me to an asylum," Helena whispered. "When I reached for the telephone, Brooke took the baseball bat from Arthur's sports bag."
The horrifying image of my gentle mother cowering on her living room floor while her own daughter-in-law struck her repeatedly ignited a quiet, controlled fire within my chest.
"Did Arthur touch you, Mom?" I asked, needing the objective truth for the legal indictment that would soon be filed in the state supreme court.
"No," Helena answered, her voice cracking with bitter sorrow. "He just turned his back, Clara. He stared out the window while his wife beat his mother with a bat."
Turning one's back during an aggravated felony against an elderly dependent was legally categorized as criminal facilitation and reckless endangerment under state law. Arthur was not escaping prison.
"Let the paramedics transport you to St. Jude's Hospital now, Mom," I said, smoothing her gray hair back from her forehead. "I have work to finish here first."
"Be careful, Clara," she murmured softly as the paramedics prepared the gurney wheels. "Landry has dangerous friends in Westbridge. People who operate in the dark."
"The dark only survives when nobody brings a lantern, Mom," I answered with a resolute smile. "Tonight, I brought the entire power grid crashing down on them."
The paramedics wheeled my mother through the lobby doors into the waiting ambulance. She passed Arthur without looking at him, leaving him weeping alone on the metal bench.
I stepped back into the central bullpen where Agent Vance's technical crew had already seized the main dispatch server and Landry's personal computer tower from his corner office.
"What did the preliminary data recovery find, Marcus?" I asked, leaning over the workstation where a technician was running an encrypted recovery drive through the server ports.
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"Landry tried to perform a secure scrub on the local video drive at 2:41 a.m.," Marcus explained, pointing to the scrolling green code on the portable monitor.
—END OF Chapter 5,
