Chapter 3 - The Wiped Server and the Missing Minutes
The silence that fell over the living room was suffocating. Mark lowered his phone slightly, the emergency dispatcher’s voice now just a distant murmur of static. He stared at Detective Vance, his mind racing to process the investigator's words. Wiped clean? That was impossible. The system had triple redundancy. Only two people in the entire world had the master administrator credentials required to purge the local hard drive from the cloud: him, and his wife, Claire.
“That’s absurd,” Mark said, his voice dropping an octave as a cold knot formed in his stomach. “The system is locked behind biometric and dual-factor authentication. No one could wipe it without—"
“Without admin rights, yes,” Vance interrupted smoothly, his eyes shifting from Mark down to Claire, who was still curled on the carpet. “And according to the network logs, the purge command was executed from a mobile device currently registered to this specific household IP address. A device that was unlocked using facial recognition just three minutes ago.”
Elena gasped softly, pressing a hand to her maroon turtleneck in a theatrical display of shock. She took a deliberate step backward, positioning herself near the hallway archway as if she feared for her physical safety.
“See?” Elena cried out, her voice pitching upward to ensure the dispatcher on Mark’s phone could hear every word. “He’s hiding something! He’s always been obsessed with controlling everything in this house, including our finances and our security systems. He probably deleted the footage himself to blame me!”
Claire let out a weak moan, finally shifting her weight. She winced in pain, her brown ponytail dragging across the plush rug as she struggled to prop herself up on one elbow. Her green knit top was stained with a small smudge of gray dust from the baseboard.
“Mark... didn't do it,” Claire whispered, her voice barely audible over the growing wail of the approaching ambulance sirens outside. She looked up at Vance with wide, pleading eyes. “My phone... my phone was on the kitchen island. Elena walked past it right before she... right before she attacked me.”
Vance knelt down beside Claire, his demeanor softening just enough to look professional rather than accusing. He didn't write anything down in his notepad; he simply watched the micro-expressions playing across the faces of the three adults in the room.
“Mrs. Hayes,” Vance said quietly, his gaze piercing. “Your sister claims you staged the fall to secure leverage in the pending inheritance lawsuit regarding your late father’s trust. She has bank records showing you transferred forty thousand dollars out of a joint account this morning.”
Mark snapped his head toward his wife, betrayal flashing in his eyes.
May you like
“Claire? What is he talking about?”
---
