Chapter 19 - The Abandoned Child
The steel door of the interview booth slammed shut with the finality of a tomb.
Courtney Lawson sat on her side of the plexiglass partition, her hands trembling so violently that the cuffs rattled loudly against the stainless steel counter. Across from her sat Victoria Vance and ADA Sarah Sterling. I stood just behind them, wearing a dark wool coat, my arms crossed over my chest.
Courtney had begged for this meeting.
When the news had filtered through the prison grapevines that Patricia had been broken out of custody—and that the man leading the extraction had been identified as Arthur Lawson—Courtney had suffered a complete psychotic collapse in her cell. She had shredded her mattress with her fingernails, screamed until she vomited blood, and had spent forty-eight hours strapped to a canvas restraint cot under suicide watch.
Now, she looked like a walking corpse. Her hair had been hacked off unevenly by prison staff after she tried to strangle herself with her own braid. Her eyes were bloodshot, sunken deep into dark purple hollows, her skin mapped with scratches from her own manicured nails.
She stared through the glass, her gaze locking onto me.
"Elena," she croaked. Her voice sounded like two dry stones grinding together. "Elena, please. Please talk to them. You have to tell them."
"Tell them what, Courtney?" I said, my voice cutting through the intercom with freezing precision.
"They left me!" Courtney shrieked, pressing her forehead against the thick scratched acrylic. "Daddy came back! He came back for Mother! He had a car, he had money, he had people! He left me here! He left me to die in this cage!"
"Your father orchestrated an armed escape to prevent your mother from testifying against him," Sarah Sterling said, opening an official Georgia Bureau of Investigation proffer agreement on the counter. "He did not come for you because you are no longer an asset, Courtney. You are a convicted felon facing life without parole. To Arthur Lawson, you are nothing more than a spilled glass of milk."
Courtney flinched as if Sterling had struck her across the mouth. Tears poured down her hollow cheeks, thick and ugly.
"I did everything he wanted," Courtney sobbed, her breath fogging the plexiglass. "Every single thing. When I was nineteen, he called me from a burner phone in Belize. He told me that if Elena ever got married, if she ever had a child, everything would be ruined. He told me that Elena wasn't a real Lawson. He said she was weak, pathetic, that she took after her grandmother’s peasant blood."
"And that justified kicking my baby?" I asked. I leaned down, bringing my face level with hers through the glass, my eyes burning into hers. "You stood there, Courtney. You laughed into that microphone. You held up my ultrasound. You called Grace disabled. And then you drove your heel into my womb. Did Daddy tell you to do that?"
Courtney’s lips trembled uncontrollably. She looked at me, and for the first time in her twenty-two years of life, the armor of spoiled narcissism was completely gone. In its place was a terrified, pathetic child who had realized that the gods she worshipped—her wealthy, sociopathic parents—had sacrificed her on their altar without a second thought.
"Mother texted me under the table," Courtney whispered, her voice barely audible through the speaker. "Two minutes before I took the mic. She showed me the message from Daddy. It said: *‘End the pregnancy today, or we all go to prison on Monday.’*"
Sterling’s pen stopped mid-air.
Sterling glanced up at Courtney, her sharp prosecutor’s eyes dilating with predatory focus. "Arthur Lawson sent that text? From where? To what device?"
"Mother had a secure sat-phone," Courtney wept, wiping her nose with her cuffed orange sleeve. "She kept it hidden inside the bottom lining of her Birkin bag. The pink one. The one that was in the banquet hall coat check. It was connected to a Swiss encrypted server. Daddy had a backup server in the mountains... in Cashiers, North Carolina. At the old hunting estate. The one that was supposed to be sold five years ago."
Victoria turned her head, looking at Sterling. Sterling was already writing at lightning speed on her legal pad.
"The Cashiers property was foreclosed by a dummy shell entity owned by a trust in Guernsey," Victoria murmured. "We thought it was abandoned. It’s off the power grid. It runs entirely on commercial solar and underground diesel generators."
"That’s where he is," Courtney cried, pressing her hands flat against the glass, pleading with me. "That’s where he took her! He has a helipad on the ridge! He’s going to fly them to an airstrip in the Bahamas before the weather clears on Friday! If you don't catch them, they’ll disappear forever, Elena! They’ll leave me here to rot, and they’ll live on an island with twenty million dollars!"
"Why should we believe you, Courtney?" I asked, my voice devoid of pity. "You’ve lied every day of your life."
"Because I hate them!" Courtney screamed, her face twisting into a mask of pure, demonic fury that shook the partition. "I hate them more than you do! He let me take the fall! He let everyone in the world see me kick you! He watched the news! He knew what they were calling me! And he came back and took *her*!"
Courtney collapsed forward, her head thudding softly against the shelf beneath the glass, her body racking with dry, violent sobs.
Sterling pushed the proffer agreement beneath the document slot. "Sign the confession, Courtney. Every detail. Every text message. Every phone call from Belize. If your testimony leads to the apprehension of Arthur and Patricia Lawson before they leave sovereign airspace, the State will recommend taking life without parole off the table. You will serve twenty-five years with the possibility of parole at age forty-five."
Courtney didn't hesitate. She grabbed the cheap institutional ballpoint pen with trembling, bruised fingers and signed her name across the bottom line with desperate, frantic strokes.
Sterling pulled the document back, blew lightly on the ink, and stood up. "Detective Miller is already coordinating with the FBI Hostage Rescue Team in Charlotte. We have their location."
I turned toward the exit, following Sterling and Victoria out of the room.
"Elena!" Courtney’s voice shrieked through the speaker one last time.
I stopped at the heavy iron door, my hand on the release bar. I looked back over my shoulder.
Courtney was staring at me through the glass, her face pale, desperate, and utterly shattered. "Elena... is the baby okay? Does she... does she hate me?"
I looked at my sister—the girl who had tried to murder my daughter for trust fund money, who had mocked my child’s life before a room of fifty people.
"Grace doesn't hate you, Courtney," I said quietly. "To Grace, you don't even exist. And by the time you walk out of prison, she will be twenty-five years old, living in the light, while you will still be choking on the dust of what you destroyed."
May you like
I pushed the door open and walked out into the cold corridor, letting the iron door slam shut behind me forever.
***