Chapter 5 - The CVS on 4th Street
The morning traffic on 4th Street was beginning to build—commuters in minivans and delivery trucks rushing to start a Saturday that felt completely detached from the wreckage of my family’s life. I pulled into the asphalt lot of the drugstore, my eyes scanning the concrete walkways until I found her.
Sarah was sitting on the curb next to a blue metal ice machine, her knees pulled up to her chest, wearing nothing but the silk blouse and tailored trousers she had worn to the hospital. She had no shoes on—just her black stockings, now torn and grey from the gravel of the parking lot. The high-society doctor’s wife, the prominent dermatologist with a private practice in the medical village, looked like a vagrant who had been discarded by the city.
I parked the Buick, grabbed a pair of old wool slippers from the backseat that I kept for driving, and walked over to her.
"Get up, Sarah," I said gently, placing the slippers on the concrete in front of her feet.
She looked up, her mascara smeared into long, black tracks down her cheeks. Her lips were blue from the morning chill. When she saw the slippers, she didn't put them on; she just reached out and wrapped her arms around my knees, burying her face in my coat like she was six years old again and had fallen off her bicycle.
"Mom," she wailed, the sound loud enough to make a man loading newspapers into a rack near the door stop and look at us. "He’s going to ruin me. He has everything. He has the bank accounts, the deeds, the patient logs from my practice... he said he’s going to prove I’m an unfit mother and an addict."
"Are you an addict, Sarah?" I asked, helping her to her feet and guiding her into the passenger seat of my car. I turned the heater on high, the warm air blowing through the vents, smelling of old leather and mint.
Sarah clamped her jaw shut, her eyes darting to the glove compartment. "I... I had a relapse six months ago. After the malpractice suit from the chemical peel went to mediation. Arthur handled it. He made the suit go away, but he... he found out I was using the old refills from the surgery center. He started managing my access. He said he was protecting me from myself."
"He wasn't protecting you, Sarah," I said, putting the car in gear and pulling back out into the traffic. "He was building a leash. A lawyer doesn't keep evidence of a crime to protect the criminal; he keeps it to ensure the criminal never leaves the courtroom."
"We can't beat him," she whispered, her hands shaking as she held them in front of the heater vents. "His firm has six partners who specialize in family law and civil extortion. They know every judge in the circuit. They’ll say Maya’s recording is inadmissible because Florida is a two-party consent state for wiretapping. They’ll say she intercepted his private communications illegally."
I smiled, a cold, sharp line that had seen dozens of arrogant young residents try to argue with me about surgical protocol.
"Two-party consent doesn't apply when the recording captures the commission of a violent felony against a minor, Sarah," I said, turning the car onto the brick-paved road that led to the county courthouse. "And Arthur forgot one very important detail about this town."
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"What?"
"Before he ever passed the bar exam, I was the head of the County Medical Ethics Commission," I said, pulling the car into the restricted law enforcement lot behind the state attorney's annex. "And the state attorney’s chief investigator is a man whose son’s ruptured appendix I removed on Christmas Eve twenty years ago. Let’s go see what an actual court looks like when the judge isn't on Arthur’s payroll."
