“Calm down,” he bellows back. “I had no idea that was going on.”

“Well, how can you have no idea? You're the head of this office. You're the face of this office. I mean, this is the largest mass murder in Orange County history. How are you not involved in it?”

No response will be enough for Paul at this point. A part of him wonders if he should reel it in.

Nah.

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

Paul lets it all out. No filter.

“This is huge,” Scott says. “We’re going to expose these guys for what they really are.”

Scott pauses. Cathy looks back, waiting anxiously for him to finish. The word comes out heavy, dripping with the years of frustration Scott’s endured from prosecutors who were just a bit too smug and righteous.

“Cheaters.”

The evidence is straightforward, airtight. It should have been a case of swift, uncomplicated justice. Instead, Scott Dekraai’s unfathomable crimes are going to tear down a curtain that has been stitched shut for more than three decades.

The cold-blooded murder of innocent friends will not just shatter a community. It will expose a system where some of the very people sworn to uphold the law had long since abandoned it. The worst mass murder in Seal Beach in decades is about to become one of the largest law enforcement scandals in U.S. history.

For 30 years, Orange County kept a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. And now, criminals as loathed as Dekraai — and even worse — are about to discover they have a second shot at freedom.