The Burden of Persuasion

The trauma of retiring early forces FBI Special Agent B. Clare Ryan to conduct an unsanctioned investigation into one of her first cases for the Bureau back in 1988. After an unfavorable verdict that was the culmination of eight years of litigation over claims of sexual harassment of Ida Callaghan by the management at the Bedford Bank in Manhattan, her father, Bradley, shot the judge over the case, Vincente Brunetti, to death at his suburban residence before committing suicide. The case is outrageous enough on its own, but Ryan is more interested in why her supervisor at the FBI forbade her from investigating it and destroyed the suicide note that Bradley left behind. This clue leads her to a diary that accuses many powerful men in New York of corruption. Now in 2013, the trail might be cold, but Ryan digs up ancient records and does everything possible, including breaking into private vaults and morgues to get to the truth, which turns out to be more explosive than she predicted. Ryan reproduces original diaries, notes, letters, police reports and other documents that finally sufficiently prove the case that both Bradley and his daughter lost. Ryan takes on the burden of persuasion and brings this case to the public at large, hiding under the veil of fiction what she cannot expose in the court of law. What was the connection between this federal Judge and a major bank like Bedford? What drove Bradley to homicide instead of another appeal? Why were there five hundred sparkling-new, but unused, Bronx-made Vachengrais autos parked outside Bradley's precinct in 1969? What was Bradley's boyhood friend, Terry, who later became the Chief of NYPD, doing on a military base in East Germany in 1955 that sent everybody in this story on a violent collision course? This mystery begins after the whodunit is long solved. Only hidden personal confessions can display what corruption has obstructed from the eyes of justice.