I want to describe what that felt like, sitting in a hospital chair beside my sleeping wife, because it was not triumph, exactly.

It was something quieter and steadier.

It was the feeling of a man who has spent his whole career watching powerful people escape consequences finally holding, in his own hands, a case airtight enough that no amount of money or local influence could make it disappear.

The Prescotts had ruled Harrington County by making sure every complaint died at the county line, in a system they controlled.

They had never once imagined a case that started above the county line, in a federal building, immune to every lever they knew how to pull.