Chapter 8 - Richard Breaks
While Beatrice was signing her life away in Room B, I walked down the corridor and stepped directly into Interrogation Room A, where Richard was being held. He looked up as the heavy steel door clicked shut, his face pale, unshaven, and streaked with tears of self-pity and cowardice.
When he saw me standing there in my Navy dress uniform—which I had worn specifically for this encounter to remind him exactly who had brought him down—he shrank back against his plastic chair.
"Margaret... please," Richard whimpered, holding up his cuffed hands. "You have to tell them to let me go! The inmates in the county holding block... they know who I am! They know what I’m charged with! I can't survive in a maximum-security prison!"
I walked slowly to the edge of the table, looking down at the man who had terrorized my daughter, feeling nothing but profound, analytical disgust.
"You thought you were a king, Richard," I said, my voice low and cutting like a serrated blade. "You thought because you wore expensive suits and signed corporate checks that you possessed the absolute right to torment and beat a woman who loved you. You confused her kindness for weakness, and you confused my silence for ignorance."
"It was my mother's idea!" Richard suddenly blurted out, tears streaming down his face as he desperately tried to shift the blame to save his own skin. "She told me Juliana’s trust fund was sitting there doing nothing! She said if I didn't keep Juliana under strict control, she would leave me and take the capital out of our development firm! My mother made me do it!"
I reached into my briefcase, pulled out a digital tablet, and hit play on the recording we had captured just twenty minutes prior in the adjacent room.
Beatrice’s clear, cold voice filled the interrogation cell: "Richard was a weak, incompetent businessman from the day he graduated college. He squandered his father's money on failed real estate deals and gambling debts. I had to step in and structure the trust fund transfers myself because he didn't have the brains to execute the fraud. If he beat his wife, that was his own lack of emotional control—I simply told him to keep her quiet."
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Richard listened to his mother’s betrayal with his mouth hanging open, his face turning the color of chalk as the realization hit him: the woman who had applauded his domestic violence had just sold him out to the federal government to save herself from lethal injection.
"You are completely alone, Richard," I stated, retrieving my tablet and turning my back on him. "Your company is gone. Your money is seized. Your mother has testified against you, and your wife is officially filing for divorce and full restitution. I suggest you get comfortable in that jumpsuit—you're going to be wearing it for the next three decades."
