Chapter 10 - The Broken Seal
By the following afternoon, Greenfield was an entirely different town.
The front page of the *Columbus Dispatch* carried a three-column headline: **DECADE OF CORRUPTION: RETIRED JUDGE STERLING INDICTED ON 42 COUNTS OF EXTORTION, FRAUD, AND CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATIONS.**
Below the headline was a color photograph of Vernon Sterling being led down the courthouse steps in an orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed to a chain around his waist, his head bowed, his camel-hair coat replaced by state-issued canvas slip-ons.
Chief Higgins had officially resigned, along with three city council members and two county prosecutors. The entire municipal government was under the control of an emergency state monitor.
I stood in Ethan’s bedroom.
The swelling in his arm had gone down significantly. He was sitting up in bed, his cast resting on a blue dinosaur pillow, coloring a picture of a tyrannosaurus rex with his good right hand. Erica sat beside him, smoothing his hair, her face finally free of the gray terror that had haunted her for three days.
"Dad?" Ethan looked up, his big brown eyes clear and curious.
"Yeah, buddy?"
"Is that mean man going to come back to our yard?"
I sat down on the edge of the mattress and gently touched his shoulder. "No, Ethan. He's never coming back. He's going to a place where he has to stay for a very, very long time."
Ethan nodded once, satisfied with the answer, and went back to his coloring.
Erica looked at me across the bed. She didn't ask how the federal government had descended on our small Ohio town like an archangel with an accounting firm. She didn't ask why the black sedans had been parked at the corner for forty-eight hours. She knew what I had done in the years before we met, and she knew the price of certain silences.
She simply reached out, took my rough, calloused hand, and squeezed it tight.
"Thank you," she whispered.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
I stepped out into the hallway, pulling out the secure burner Nicole had given me.
"Sean," Nicole’s voice was tight, missing the calm, clinical composure she had maintained throughout the operation.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "Vernon was denied bail this morning."
"It's not Vernon," Nicole said, her breath shallow. "We opened his personal safety deposit box at the Greenfield National Bank under the federal seizure warrant."
"And?"
"He didn't just have municipal bonds and cash in there, Sean," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "He had a sealed courier pouch from the Department of Defense. Class Alpha Top Secret. Dated August 14, 2012. Helmand Province."
My heart went entirely still.
"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
May you like
"Vernon’s younger brother wasn't just a lawyer," Nicole whispered. "He was a staff judge advocate at Bagram Air Base during your deployment. He stole the casualty inquest files from the compound fire. The real files, Sean. The ones Cyrus Vance spent twelve years burying."
***
