Stolen Power

usually forgotten on long mornings in a warm bed, a chance to recover and revive. Usually, Sunday mornings are spent holding a loved one close, their warm body creating a sense of comfort and escape. A long breakfast, a quiet cup of coffee, and a nice read of the paper usually follows.
Usually.
Not this Sunday morning. Not when the life of a five-year-old girl was on the line. Not with just four days to go. And counting.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts at reaching him by phone, my brother-in-law, Ben Glazier, finally answered on the fifth try.
“Jack, it’s 5am on Sunday morning.” He moaned. “What do you want?”
“I don’t have time to mess around.” I was blunt. “I’m outside your front door.”
“You’re what?!”
He muttered an expletive then the phone hung up, and after a few moments, I heard the movements of a tired man trying hard not to wake the remaining members of his family. When someone showed up at your front door early on a Sunday morning, most people knew it was serious: if not, why would they disturb your sacred time?
Apprehensively, Ben opened the front door, while still tying the waist of his white robe together.
“It had better not be Claire’s money that she left for Alannah.”
The shock of the statement caught him off-guard, his eyes widened, pupils dilating rapidly as the fear became clearly visible on his face. He quickly tried to recover and conceal his emotions, badly faking a morning yawn in order to buy him the necessary time to think on the fly, a few extra seconds to get his mental faculties together but it was all too obvious, all too clear to see.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about Jack.” He looked away from me, away from my glare. “And I don’t know why you’re here on a Sunday morning discussing money. Have you been drinking hard again?”
It was a poor effort to deflect his guilt on me with the drinking jibe. I’d played this game before and with far better players than him.
“Ben,” I stepped close to him, close enough for him to feel my breath. “I’ve got a job from Chase Martin.”
His face dropped. The game was up and he knew it.
“Alright, alright.” He hushed me, stepped away from the front door, and closed the door behind him. “I’ll listen to you, just don’t wake the family.”
“You’ll do more than listen, you’ll answer my questions unreservedly too. You hear me?”
He nodded, meekly.
Ben was slight, clean cut, late thirties. Brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and I was sure he’d have a hairy back, not that I ever wanted to check. A cop by day, a family man by night, and an idiot twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
He’d seen some of the worst the streets of Chicago had to offer, some gruesome crimes and some senseless killings, recently losing a partner in a gunfight with gangbangers. His once boyish looks were fading to middle-age, the bags under his eyes becoming more pronounced and the previously thin lines on his forehead now deep and furrowed. His waistline too was beginning to bulge and his overall health was on a steep downward trajectory: hypertension, stomach ulcers and high cholesterol were his new normal. But that didn’t mean I was going to go easy on him, far from it.
When I first started dating his sister, he wasn’t happy. He thought I was too tough, too rough, and full of too much violent stuff to care about her. He barely spoke a word to me until the day of Claire’s and my wedding, which we held in the beautiful town of Madison, Wisconsin, for just a handful of family and friends in an historic chapel, St. Patrick’s, there he shook my hand, told a bad joke, and afterwards at the reception shared a beer. That was the start of an awkward relationship, at best. You know what they say: you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, and certainly not your in-laws. But as the old joke goes: what’s the difference between in laws and outlaws?... outlaws are wanted. You’re thrown into social situations with people who, were you not obligated, you almost certainly wouldn’t bother seeing at all.
“What are you doing with Chase Martin?” Ben asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Ok. Ok.” He touched my elbow and led me down the path that went to their front gate, further from the family. “I lost money with Chase.”
Again, I didn’t respond.
“He’s not a nice guy, Jack. He’s the scum of the earth. A group of us invested with him, he ripped us all off, and has almost bankrupted me. Ruined everything I’ve worked hard to gain. I want nothing to do with him. I’ve tried to arrest him for fraud, but it’s no use, he’s always got these high-powered lawyers protecting his sorry ass.”
He was starting to get flustered, but still no response from me. I let him stew.
Silence can be the heaviest of statements. Under the pressure of silence, under the thunderous weight of quiet, a nervous person can try to fill the gaps with information, try and fill the quiet with knowledge. Sometimes lies, but often the truth. And what usually happens is that a person spills so much more than they ever intended to. I’m sure he did it when the roles were reversed and he was a cop interrogating someone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as susceptible to it as well.
Finally, he sighed.
“Ok, Jack. Yes, I invested Claire’s money.”
“That money was for Alannah’s college fund. She left that behind in her will for Alannah.” I grunted, turning to face him square on and look him in the eye. “That wasn’t your money to invest.”
I could feel my blood rising. I was angry. And getting more so. At what he’d done