Chapter 7 - The Interrogator’s Mirror
7
Six months later.
The air inside the interrogation room at the Federal Building in downtown Chicago was crisp, smelling faintly of institutional floor wax, cold coffee, and the quiet, crushing weight of absolute justice. The room was a stark, sterile cube of white concrete and brushed steel, dominated by a massive, one-way mirror that took up an entire wall.
Reagan Dennis—now legally processed under her birth name, Rachel Lawson, and stripped of every fake social security token she had stolen over twelve years—sat on the opposite side of the steel table.
She looked completely unrecognizable. The polished, impeccably styled upper-class matriarch who had ruled the Silver Lake neighborhood was gone. She wore a bright orange inmate jumpsuit, her hands and feet secured to the floor anchors by heavy steel chains that clinked dismally against the concrete floor boards with every minor movement. Her straightened hair was an uneven, short crop of graying strands; her face was gaunt and heavily scarred from the concussive thermal burns of the electrical explosion at the storage vault.
I stood behind the one-way mirror in the observation room, my arms crossed over my tailored gray civilian wool suit jacket, my eyes fixed on the monitor displaying her vitals. Beside me stood Special Agent Harris, a sharp woman whose face carried the quiet satisfaction of a long investigation finally finalized.
"She hasn't spoken a single word to her defense team since the grand jury signed the indictments last week," Agent Harris said, turning a page on her digital tablet. "She refused medical treatment beyond the basic clinic dressings. She just sits there, staring at the concrete door like she’s waiting for a message from Cyprus."
"The Cyprus pipeline is completely dead, Harris," I said, my voice completely calm, devoid of any anger or hatred. I looked at her through the glass with a cold, clinical detachment. "The federal receivership completed the asset liquidation process on her personal real estate portfolio yesterday afternoon. Every dollar of the frozen eighty-five million dollars has been officially channeled into a non-revocable charitable endowment—*The Camden Dennis Foundation for Public Security and Child Advocacy*."
"The foundation is opening its first tracking hubs inside the family court system next month, Finnley," Agent Harris smiled, a deep sense of pride softening her voice. "We’re going to ensure that no young man ever has to sit inside a prison cell for three long years, trembling with secrets, while a family predator forces his father into an involuntary medical isolation bunker. You gave this state its dignity back, Finnley."
I let out a long, slow breath, a deep, profound sense of relief softening the hard lines around my eyes. The invisible cage of marital deceit, corporate extortion, and quiet terror that Reagan and my stepbrother Carter had built around my life had finally, permanently shattered, leaving nothing but the open sky ahead.
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"There’s someone who wants to see you before they transport her to the federal facility in vault," Harris added, her eyes cutting toward the heavy security corridor down the hall. "She legally requested a final meeting with her former stepson under the supervision of the federal marshals. You don't have to go, Finnley. You don't owe her a single second of your time."
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