"I’m not taking this to the local DA," I replied coldly, reaching into my pocket and pulling out her mud-caked phone. I wiped the glass against my sleeve. The screen was cracked, spider-webbing across the upper right corner, but the display still flickered to life.
The video file was still intact.
"Can you unlock this?" I asked, handing it to her.
Her fingers were shaking so violently she mistyped the passcode twice before getting it right. "What are you going to do?"
"We need redundant backups immediately. Upload the raw video file to a secure cloud drive, then email a duplicate to my official Justice Department address and my personal encrypted server." I rattled off the addresses while keeping one eye on the dark intersections. "Do it right now, before this battery dies or that phone locks up permanently."
While Ava’s trembling fingers tapped away at the screen, my mind raced back to Sullivan’s parting words through the phone.
Ask him about the summer of nineteen-eighty-four. Ask him about the old warehouse on Fourth Avenue before you start handing out indictments.
Nineteen eighty-four. Forty years ago.
In the summer of 1984, I was only two years old. My father was thirty-four, teaching American history at Bessemer High School and active in the local civic improvement league. He had never spoken about that period of his life with anything more than vague, melancholy dismissals. He had always told Naomi and me that those were hard years in the town, a time when the steel mills were shutting down, families were tearing apart, and the city was sliding into poverty and tension.
Why would an active-duty police lieutenant evoke an incident from forty years ago to justify slapping an elderly man in an open courtroom?
And more importantly: what did Judge Harrison Vance have to do with my father?
"The files are uploaded," Ava said, her voice breathy, snapping me out of my thoughts. "I sent them to both addresses. It went through."
"Good," I said, pulling my car down a dimly lit residential side street lined with overgrown water oaks, three blocks away from UAB Medical West. I turned off the headlights and idled under the heavy shadow of a Spanish moss canopy.
"Why are we stopping?" Ava whispered, panic flaring in her eyes again. "We can't go back there! Sullivan is in that hospital!"
"I'm not leaving my father and sister at the mercy of a corrupt precinct," I said, setting the parking brake. "Sullivan thinks he holds all the cards because he operates in the dark. He relies on fear, isolation, and local jurisdiction. He doesn't know you survived the rail yard, and he doesn't know that the video is already sitting on a federal server in Atlanta."
I picked up my personal phone and dialed a ten-digit number from memory—the private cell of Marcus Hayes, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Birmingham Field Office. Marcus and I had spent two years working together on an interstate public procurement kickback ring three years ago. We trusted each other implicitly.
The phone rang three times before a deep, authoritative baritone answered.
"Lennox? What’s an Atlanta AUSA doing calling my personal line on a rainy Thursday night?"
"Marcus, I need immediate tactical intervention and federal witness protection in Bessemer," I said without preamble.
The tone on the other end changed instantly, the casual warmth evaporating into razor-sharp professional focus. "Talk to me, Isaiah. What happened?"
"My father, Clarence Lennox, was assaulted this afternoon inside Courtroom Two of the Bessemer District Court by Lieutenant Knox Sullivan. Sullivan fractured his orbital bone and split his head open. Sullivan’s men just attempted to run down an eyewitness and kill her in an abandoned rail yard to destroy video evidence. I have the eyewitness, and I have the footage showing the assault, the destruction of official court surveillance feeds, and municipal Judge Harrison Vance ordering the attack."
A heavy, stunned silence hung over the line for three agonizing seconds.
"Jesus Christ, Isaiah," Marcus breathed. "Harrison Vance? Are you certain?"
"I have the clerk who stood ten feet from them, Marcus. I have the video. But Sullivan is currently inside UAB Medical West, inside Room Twelve, holding my father and sister hostage under the guise of an internal investigation. If local units secure that room, my father won't make it to sunrise."
"I’m ten minutes away from the Birmingham office," Marcus said, his voice ringing with absolute urgency. "I'm mobilizing our rapid-response civil rights squad right now. Two unmarked Suburbans, eight armed federal agents. We will establish a perimeter around that hospital room and take custody of your family and your witness. Do not go in there alone, Isaiah. Sullivan is unstable, and Vance practically owns the county sheriff's department."
"I can't wait ten minutes, Marcus," I said, looking through the rain toward the glowing red emergency cross of the hospital visible through the trees. "Sullivan is in that room right now. If he realizes Bell’s partner failed at the rail depot, he’ll execute a cover-up before your tires hit the asphalt."
"Isaiah, wait for us! If you engage an armed officer inside a municipal facility, it gives them every legal justification to claim self-defense!"
"Just get here," I said, and disconnected the call.
I turned to Ava. "Take my keys. Lock the doors from the inside. Lie down across the back seat so nobody can see you through the glass. If anyone other than Marcus Hayes and federal agents taps on that window, you blow the horn and don't stop. The FBI will be on this corner in eight minutes."
"Please don't go in there," Ava begged, tears streaming down her face. "You don't know what Knox Sullivan is capable of. He killed a boy twelve years ago in a holding cell and called it a suicide. The grand jury never even saw the files."
"He hasn't faced someone who knows how to fight back," I said, slipping my federal credentials into my left hand, pulling my coat tight, and stepping out into the cold downpour.