Justice Rising

She could’ve been anything she wanted. She wanted her life back. She didn’t want glory or fame. She wanted justice. She never was one for the spotlight, but she noticed everything. She had been trained that way. Despite vivid memories seared into her brain, she took notes. Her favorite place, her black Moleskine notebook. Smooth texture, clean lines, elastic band marking her place, detailing justice sought, and stories of corruption complete with sketches, names and sources.

“The Book” started in a custom ordered, leather-bound reproduction reminiscent of a Tiffany's box. Every copy having been stolen with her former life. Every time, she duplicated it from memory-an unfortunate side effect of a photographic memory. Then it was about love, dreams of being a lawyer, wife and mother. It had been morphed into something else completely.

It wasn’t a memoir of scandalous love affairs. She was the woman who got away for every man she had known. Men endangered their careers and families for her. Her brilliance gleaned by a mobster having promised her protection as a teenager, her stepfather promising to watch over her on his death bed, her favorite boss, an ex-Navy Seal, adopted as her father who promised her, she would always be safe at any cost. She hadn’t known she would need it until November 2018.

She struggled to believe people were good. They had only gotten worse. Police refusing to do anything to ease her suffering. She had endured every violation of all her civil rights alone. She had someone on speed dial for anything she needed. Now her speed dial was the problem. She had been taught law enforcement did anything but protect or serve. She was left with unseen allies in a world turned upside down and inside out. Unfortunately, it was all real.

“The Book” would soon put criminals in prison so they couldn’t do this to anyone else. Putting her back on the fast track to law school and justice. One-part detailed crime of those walking the streets with badges, those who were injustice personified. In other sections, her project she dubbed the KCCO Care bear Army, to keep people from hurting like she did, fixes for systems that had failed her, solved legal cases solved while being prevented from going to law school. A neglected section, names drawn in hearts of Knights who would have to defend her honor and protect her, like Guinevere. Baby names were the last whispers of that dream. The continual infliction of emotional distress put her on auto-pilot unable to really feel anything. She rarely got the chance to focus on law school. Luckily, she didn’t need references for law school-she still had those. She needed justice and money.

Sadly, asshole always required her attention. She would rather focus on good, but good never showed its face. More like delinquent children in need of a probation officer, were police officers helping criminals roam the street to create victims. Former friends who hid in cowardness. “The Book” wasn't finished until everyone who had hurt her was in prison. She wouldn’t live in a world where police officers were concerned not with putting bad guys but covering their own ass. Her quest for justice unaided by police chiefs and police officers who should be helping her. She had done what no one expected with the case documents-hidden copies with an FBI agent. She couldn’t get to him, but neither could they. Gang investigators turned their back, investigating street gang crime and protecting criminals in their own ranks. Friends and professional colleagues had become silent without explanation.

She missed the judges, her favorite boss and lawyers, she never forgot working with. She might be biologically an asshole's daughter, but she fell far from that tree. These people were not her biologic family but they had made an impression on her and in her world they were.

Her father had ignored her when she called for help, so she stopped calling. He had never really been a father anyway. He gave up any right to forgiveness in October 2019, when she had called about being raped, molested and her cats- Jacob and Ella killed. She didn't mourn his loss. She was not so unfeeling as to wish him dead, but imprisoned yes, with good reason.

The Book had always been about justice and accountability. Any one of the things done to her warranted special attention from federal law enforcement and press. Cops had been friends and lovers. She worked with them for over a decade, friends turned to foe for no reason. Their mistake, thinking she would forget.

She hadn't been like this two years ago. A Judge had wanted her to marry a police officer, she loved fiercely and passionately. After having been violently sexually assaulted by a tow truck driver changed her. She would never forget every detail, even though law enforcement would rather say she couldn’t even speak to detectives rather than take a statement.

Others had heard of her, and “The Book”. Without her knowing, they silently supported her cause and banded together to help her. Couriers of intel determined not to lose her. Hers was not a mission of vengeance but forced to make it so, she began unmasking everyone’s secrets. Secrets were currency. Exposing their secrets to remind them what they had done to her. If she had to live with the consequences of their inaction, they could too.

Her life, devoid of much that made her her but her breeding and brain remained. She always minded her manners- grandpa was Navy and would never forgive her if she didn't. She grew up with money, and grandparents who had given her every advantage. Money had never turned her into anyone different. It may have taught her how to carry a purse, and coordinate outfits but it never had made her spoiled.

She hid her allies in a project in The Book. People she trusted, who trusted her. Her heroes saved people, and didn’t think what she had lost was okay. She would never understand the silence from the people she loved or people who should have prevented it. Her protection had fallen to everyday heroes for too long. Each having earned a special place in her heart by showing her theirs. They were hunting justice with her because she would always made sure they had it. Along the way they picked up her cause where she couldn't and hadn't asked. They did the work she couldn't do when but police officers destroyed her in the process. She knew them by two things: their unwavering support and phrases spoken to her. Their way of telling her they stood with her, not against her. Sometimes it was nothing more than a tip in a day job or random acts of kindness to remind her that they believed her and wouldn’t let her fail. “The Book” documented those people too.

Often, too tired to catch a name but she always remembered a face and a compliment. She couldn't do it alone. She might be able to save others but she needed those people to save her. People judged her. She knew she was a shell of the woman she once was. What she had left was not much and not of her making. She had something every man had once desired to possess, a brain full of magic, and the training to outdo them all. Two years of seeking justice without anything she once had, all the things that made her her, her companions in having been killed by unrepentant people able to live with their sins where she could not, covering up their skeletons in the closet, trying to intimidate her rather than help because they lacked her passion. She always welcomed a new hero in her quest to right wrongs. What bound them together was truth and justice. No one ever had to ask “Who is that woman?” She didn't have a lasso of truth, or even a laptop, but she was the evidence. The biggest problem –everything and everyone.

She found refuge in a small Georgia town. A place no one would think to look for her. No place and no one in Georgia had helped her. Having had a surgery 18 months before she suffered from medical complications and emotional pain every day. The physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional pain. She knew there was a life out there resembling what it was two years ago but these days it was hard to see. No police department in Georgia would actually do anything. Police having left her to investigate the case she had been working on for two years-her own. The brutal sexual assault in Brookhaven, Ga, having been beat by her then boyfriend, a Pooler police officer who destroyed her life officers kill her beloved cats, stealing her car, hard copies of the evidence. Chatham County Sheriff’s department her electronics and her identity. The Savannah Police department had tortured her. She still had the evidence but no one would collect it.

Her book was no different then case every cop had, an unsolved one that haunted them. A puzzle easily solved if anyone would listen. Even her former boyfriend, a GBI agent’s son, the man a Judge had wanted her to marry, whose daughters she had been step-mother to without the official title had turned in the man she had never known him to be- absent and silent for the last two years. He had told her she should work for the GBI, during a Chinese lunch when she had theorized about a possible money laundering scheme Amazon didn’t even probably realize it had. She had considered it but they to sucked and so did its lawyers. Crime scene photos of her life haunted her dreams. She had been forced to be law enforcement without the paycheck. As haunted, she was by her own case and she hoped everyone was haunted by her. The beautiful soul they had turned into a jaded survivor.

Each name a check waiting to be written by an agency obstructing justice, not just to her but victims created every day. She didn't consider herself an avenging angel, just justifiably angry. She smoothed her finger down lined pages, neatly jotted with all the information anyone ever needed. Despite herself, a Taylor Swift song danced in her brain - "But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time. Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time. I got a list of names, and yours is in red, underline. I check it once, then I check it twice, oh! The world moves on, another day another drama, drama. But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma. And then the world moves on, but one thing's for sure. Maybe I got mine, but you'll all get yours." The question was who would be the instrument of justice. Then her world took an unexpected turn- $20,000.

She would never know where it came from. Her Midas touch had returned. Gazing at her dwindling bank account, she saw it. In shock...She could fund her pursuit of justice. She could rebuild everything taken from her. It was the start of something beautiful from all she had been through. The world stopped running in reverse and started running in fast forward in her favor. The money funneled to her by citizen heroes who could not fix what had been broken but saw she was too important to be lost. They would fund justice she had been denied. They would be the heroes no one was - the solution not part of the problem. The woman who had always taken care of everyone, everyone decided to take care of. The $20, 000 was just the beginning. Her Avengers would not lose their Black Widow. They needed her and they would not stand by and watch her sacrifice herself. So began Justice Rising.