Instead I took the truth up and out — out of the county, out of the darkness, up to a federal level where the Prescotts controlled nothing, where a recording was just a recording and a dash-cam video was just a fact and a sheriff’s twenty-two-year reputation meant nothing at all.

I dragged their crimes out of the darkness they controlled and into a daylight they did not, and in that daylight they were not a kingdom at all.

They were just criminals with evidence against them, like any others.

That is how you defeat a powerful local machine: never in its own darkness, always in a larger daylight.

Corrupt power is like a fungus; it can only survive in the dark, and it dies the moment real light reaches it.

The Prescotts had spent twenty-two years making sure the light never reached them.