Chapter 13
The interview room was small, windowless, and smelled faintly of floor wax and stale black coffee. Clara sat across the metal table from Detective Miller, her hands folded neatly over the USB drive resting near the center of the surface. Leo sat quietly in a corner chair provided by the department, coloring on a notepad with a blue crayon provided by a sympathetic female officer.
Detective Miller closed the door softly and pulled out the metal chair opposite Clara. He placed the small brown pill bottle inside a clear plastic evidence bag, holding it up to the overhead fluorescent light to examine the scraped label.
"We ran a preliminary field test on the residue in the lab upstairs," Miller said, his voice quiet and measured. "It’s a heavy-grade neuroleptic sedative, typically used for severe psychiatric disorders. If you had taken even a week's worth of those at the dosage implied by the container, it would have induced severe cognitive impairment, memory loss, and a state resembling clinical disorientation within ten days."
Clara felt a cold shiver run down her spine, despite the warmth of the room. The abstract fear she had felt in the kitchen crystallized into a terrifying reality. Julian hadn't just been trying to intimidate her or force a legal separation; he had been actively engineering her medical collapse to cement his control over the estate and secure full custody of Leo under the guise of her mental breakdown.
"He filed false property deeds, Detective," Clara said, pushing the USB drive across the table. "Everything is on that drive. The forged signatures on the trust transfer, the bank receipts, the emails from his private account coordinating the purchase of those compounds through an unregistered online distributor."
Miller slid the drive into his pocket without breaking eye contact. "We’ve already dispatched a unit to your residence with a search warrant signed by an emergency magistrate twenty minutes ago. Given that he locked down the smart-home grid from the inside, they might have to force entry, but our cyber-forensics team is already patching into their router."
Before the detective could finish his sentence, the heavy metal door of the interview room swung open. A young uniform officer leaned in, whispering urgently into Miller’s ear.
May you like
Miller’s expression hardened. He looked back at Clara, a grim nod confirming what they both already suspected. "They breached the house. Julian tried to wipe the master server, but our tech team intercepted the data stream in time. He’s in custody."
***
