Chapter 4 - The Court of Public Opinion
By seven o’clock the following morning, the world had caught fire.
The video of Derek Barker striking a female Rear Admiral in full dress uniform had gone completely viral. Across TikTok, Instagram, and cable news networks, the clip played on a continuous loop.
CNN ran the headline: **ARROGANT HEIR ASSAULTS NAVY ADMIRAL SISTER AT CHARITY GALA.**
FOX News led with: **DISGRACE IN DRESS WHITES: MOTHER AND SON ARRESTED AFTER ATTACKING HERO FLAG OFFICER.**
By 8:00 AM, Derek’s face was the most hated face in the United States.
Inside the federal holding facility at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego, Derek sat on a cold concrete bench wearing an orange jumpsuit that was two sizes too large. His nose was packed with gauze, his left eye was swollen shut in a dark purple ring, and his hands trembled violently as the heavy steel door slid open.
I walked into the interrogation room wearing my working khakis, unaccompanied except for a single Navy JAG investigator who set a digital audio recorder on the metal table.
Derek looked up, flinching automatically, pressing his back against the wall.
“Maya...” he rasped, his voice trembling. “Please. You have to get me out of here. The guards... the other inmates... they know what I did. They know who you are. A guy in the breakfast line told me he was going to break my jaw the second the guards look away. Please, Maya. Tell them it was a family dispute! Drop the charges!”
I sat down across from him, folded my hands on the cold metal surface, and leaned forward.
“Derek, you struck a flag officer in the presence of four hundred witnesses and four high-definition military broadcast cameras,” I said calmly. “The United States Attorney for the Southern District of California has already filed charges under 18 U.S. Code § 111—assaulting a federal officer. The minimum sentence is three years. The maximum is ten.”
Derek’s breathing became ragged. A tear leaked out of his uninjured eye, cutting a clean path through the dried blood and grime on his cheek.
“I didn’t know!” he wept. “Mom told me you were nothing! She told me you were just a low-level sailor who failed out of officer school! She said you came to the gala to beg for money from Frank’s estate! She told me to hit you so you’d leave before anyone noticed!”
“Mother told you?” I cocked an eyebrow. “And you always did whatever Patricia said, didn’t you? As long as she kept writing checks from Dad’s stolen accounts.”
“It wasn’t just me!” Derek leaned forward, desperation making him frantic. His cuffed hands rattled against the table. “Mom was the one who controlled everything! She had Dad’s checkbook! She hid his pills! She was the one who told the hospice nurses to stop coming on weekends!”
The room suddenly felt ten degrees colder.
The JAG officer beside me clicked a pen.
I looked Derek dead in the eyes. “Say that again.”
Derek swallowed hard, realizing he had just crossed a lethal line. He looked at the tape recorder, then back at me.
“Derek,” I said, my voice dangerously soft. “If you want any hope of serving your time in a minimum-security camp instead of a maximum-security federal penitentiary with real violent felons, you are going to tell me every single thing that happened in that house during Dad’s last month.”
Derek began to shake so violently his knees knocked together beneath the table.
“Three weeks before Dad died,” Derek stammered, his words tumbling out in a terrified rush, “he found out about the second will Arthur drafted for him. Dad told Mom he was signing it on Friday. He said he was leaving the house, the land, and the grandfather’s ranch in Coronado to you. He called her a leech. He told her she was going to die alone in a gutter.”
Derek took a jagged breath, wiping his nose on the shoulder of his orange jumpsuit.
“Mom lost her mind. That night, she fired the private night nurse you hired. She told the agency we couldn’t afford it anymore. And then... she took Dad’s heart medication. The digitalis and the blood thinners. She threw them down the garbage disposal.”
The room went dead silent.
Even the JAG investigator stopped taking notes, staring at Derek with utter revulsion.
“Go on,” I said, my jaw clenching so hard I felt my molars grind.
“Dad started having chest pains two days later,” Derek whispered, looking down at his lap, unable to meet my gaze. “He asked for his pills. Mom told him the pharmacy hadn’t delivered them yet. She locked his bedroom door from the outside so he couldn’t crawl down the hallway to the phone. She told me... she told me that if he made it to Friday, we would lose everything. She said he was an old, broken soldier who was going to die anyway, and that she was just... hurrying up the inevitable.”
“And what did you do, Derek?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Derek sobbed, burying his face in his cuffed hands. “I stayed in the pool house. I put on my headphones. I didn’t want to hear him coughing.”
I slowly stood up from the table.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t hit him. He wasn’t worth the energy of a clenched fist. He was nothing—a hollow, spineless parasite who had let his own father suffocate in the dark so he could keep driving leased Porsches.
“Maya, please!” Derek screamed as I turned toward the heavy steel door. “I’ll testify! I’ll sign whatever you want! Just don’t leave me in here!”
I paused at the door, glancing back over my shoulder.
“You’re going to sign an official sworn deposition with the FBI and NCIS, Derek,” I said coldly. “And then you’re going to watch your mother get led into a courtroom in chains.”
“And what about me?” he cried out. “What happens to me?”
I looked at the boy who had once kicked my clothes into the street and told me I was nothing.
May you like
“You reap what you sowed twenty-five years ago, Derek. You get the bigger room. Only this time, the walls are made of steel, and the door locks from the outside.”
***
