Chapter 9 - The Counter-Strike
The morning sun filtered harshly through the blinds of the precinct holding area as Marcus marched out of the precinct doors with Sarah walking right beside him. The charges hadn't been dropped yet—the wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly—but Marcus’s emergency writ of habeas corpus, backed by irrefutable metadata proving the IP address of the uploaded "evidence," had forced the district attorney to release her pending a full forensic audit of the Keller household.
They didn't go back to the suburban house. Instead, Marcus drove Sarah straight to a quiet downtown hotel where he had booked a suite overlooking the city skyline.
“You can’t stay there, and you certainly can’t talk to Ryan without me present,” Marcus instructed, pouring her a cup of hot black coffee from the room service tray. “My tech expert is already cloning the hard drives of every smart device in that house using a remote warrant loophole we secured an hour ago. By this afternoon, we’ll have every text, email, and deleted file they thought they hid.”
Sarah sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, wrapping her hands around the warm ceramic mug. The exhaustion was a heavy weight behind her eyes, but her mind was crystal clear. The victim mentality was gone.
“Ryan called my cell phone twenty times while we were in the car,” Sarah said, staring at the phone sitting face down on the nightstand. It vibrated silently against the wood every few minutes, a persistent, buzzing heartbeat of desperation.
“Let him sweat,” Marcus advised grimly, walking over to the window. “He’s realizing right now that his mother’s precious trust fund is about to be liquidated to pay off his debts, and that the police are looking at him for filing a false police report. They’re turning on each other as we speak.”
True to Marcus’s prediction, the phone lit up with a text message instead of a call. Sarah picked it up, her eyes scanning the screen. It was from Helen.
We need to talk. Drop the charges, sign the nondisclosure agreement, and Ryan will grant you an uncontested divorce with a small settlement. If you don't, we will make sure you never work in this town again.
Sarah let out a cold, humorless laugh, handing the phone to her brother. Marcus read the message, and a slow, predatory smile spread across his face.
“Desperation looks ugly on them,” Marcus remarked, tossing the phone back onto the bed. “They think they hold all the cards because they control the narrative. They don’t realize we just found the master ledger.”
“What master ledger?” Sarah asked, sitting up straight.
May you like
Marcus tapped his briefcase. “The offshore accounts Helen set up to siphon money away from her late husband’s estate—money she used to bail Ryan out of his first gambling addiction three years ago. It’s all right here in the digital backup your husband accidentally synced to your shared cloud drive.”
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