The Trial
Chapter 11 - The Trial
Victor's trial began five months after his second arrest, the case having moved through pretrial proceedings with a speed Sarah attributed directly to the overwhelming physical evidence assembled against him, the scaffold sabotage footage, Gary Finch's detailed testimony, the burner phone messages, and the tools found in his own vehicle during the second, foiled attempt.
Nathan testified on the third day, walking the jury through the entire ordeal, the collapsed scaffold, the discovery of his own adoption, the DNA confirmation, and finally, the second attempt on his life that had ultimately secured Victor's arrest.
"He tried to kill me because a will written thirty-four years ago might have given me an inheritance he'd already spent his whole life believing was entirely his," Nathan told the court. "I never asked for any of this. I didn't even know he existed until the day he sabotaged the very scaffold I was supposed to be standing on."
Gary Finch testified as well, his cooperation providing exactly the kind of corroborating detail that made Victor's continued denials increasingly untenable as the trial progressed.
Victor's own attorney attempted, on the fifth day, to introduce a defense built around diminished capacity, suggesting his client's actions stemmed from a specific, sudden psychological crisis rather than calculated, premeditated violence.
The prosecution's response was swift, presenting the eleven-month-old private investigator's invoice, evidence that Victor had spent nearly a year quietly monitoring his brother before ever attempting harm, a timeline entirely incompatible with sudden crisis and considerably more consistent with patient, deliberate planning.
The jury deliberated for just under five hours before returning a guilty verdict on all counts, attempted murder, conspiracy, and the original workplace sabotage charges from the scaffold incident.
Victor's sentencing, held three weeks later, resulted in a term of twenty-two years, a number the judge described, in her formal remarks, as reflecting both the calculated, sustained nature of the attempted murder and the specific, cold betrayal of a man targeting his own newly discovered brother purely to protect an inheritance he'd never actually been entitled to keep.
Nathan attended the sentencing, feeling a complicated mixture of relief and grief settle over him as the number was read aloud, an entire chapter of his life finally, formally closing.
May you like
"It's over," Sarah told him, as they left the courthouse together, considerably more personally invested in this outcome than her usual cases ever left her.
"The legal part is over," Nathan said, echoing something he'd heard from another survivor once, though he couldn't quite place where. "I think the rest of it, understanding what I actually lost and what I actually gained, that part's going to take a lot longer."
