Chapter 9 - The Precipice at Sunset Cliffs
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of fluorescent lights, antiseptic smells, and voices asking the same questions in different tones of disbelief.
They treated my broken arm at UC San Diego Medical Center, setting the bone and encasing it in a fiberglass cast from wrist to elbow.
Two FBI agents from the San Diego Field Office—Special Agent Martinez and Special Agent Vance, who had flown in on a red-eye from Denver—sat in the room while the doctors worked.
They didn't arrest me. They didn't handcuff Claire.
The hard drive she had carried out of the house was a master key. Evan Ross had kept meticulous records—not out of thoroughness, but out of insurance. He had documented every payoff, every forged death certificate, every laundering transaction for four years to ensure that if his cartel clients ever turned on him, he could bring them down with him.
By noon the following day, federal warrants were being executed in three states.
Marcus Croft was arrested at his luxury penthouse in Cherry Creek. Dr. Harris from the Adams County Coroner’s Office was taken into custody at his suburban home. Evan Ross was wheeled out of surgery under armed federal guard, facing sixty-five years in federal prison for racketeering, wire fraud, conspiracy, and attempted murder.
And Claire?
Claire sat in a small conference room on the sixth floor of the Federal Building in downtown San Diego, surrounded by two federal public defenders and an Assistant United States Attorney.
Because she had provided the evidence, because she had been coerced under credible threat of death to her family, and because she had never touched a single cent of the stolen money, the Department of Justice offered her a deferred prosecution agreement.
She wouldn't go to prison.
She would have to surrender her CPA license. She would have to pay heavy fines. She would be on supervised probation for five years.
She was legally alive again.
On Friday afternoon, they finally let us leave the federal building.
We walked down the wide granite steps into the bright California sunshine. The media hadn't picked up the full story yet—the federal prosecutor had sealed the indictments until the remaining arrests were completed—so there were no cameras, no microphones, no crowd.
Just the two of us.
I wore clean clothes Rachel had overnighted to my hotel: a gray sweater, dark jeans, and my coat with the left sleeve cut open to accommodate the cast.
Claire wore a simple dark blue linen shirt and trousers she had bought at the hospital pharmacy gift shop. Her face was pale, the bruise on her cheek turning a deep, plum purple, her lip still swollen.
She looked at me, her eyes tentative, terrified of what came next.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked quietly.
“The ocean,” I said.
We took a cab to Sunset Cliffs.
The driver dropped us off along the coastal boulevard. We walked slowly down the dirt path to the edge of the sandstone bluffs, where the cliffs dropped fifty feet into the churning, emerald surf below.
The afternoon sun was melting toward the horizon, painting the Pacific in broad strokes of copper, rose, and gold. The air was cool, smelling of kelp and sea salt.
May you like
We stood three feet apart. Close enough that I could hear her breathing, but separated by an ocean wider than the one before us.
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