Chapter 8 - The Hidden Laptop
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By the next afternoon, a police escort accompanied Rebecca to our house on Elm Street to execute a search warrant based on my formal statement and the burn evidence.
Luke was already in police custody, held on suspicion of felony domestic assault, meaning the house was completely empty when they arrived.
When Rebecca returned to the hospital room that evening, she wasn't carrying clothes or toiletries. She was carrying a dusty, silver laptop with a cracked hinge and a faded blue sailboat sticker near the keyboard.
My heart leaped into my throat.
“He kept it,” I breathed.
“He didn't just keep it,” Rebecca said, placing it on the bedside table. “He had it stashed in a lockbox behind his power tools, right alongside your original birth certificate, your passport, and Mom’s pearl necklace.”
“Did the police unlock it?”
“Not yet,” Rebecca said. “The police forensics unit took an image of the hard drive at the station, but the detective assigned to your case, Detective Miller, gave us permission to have a certified digital forensics expert examine a clone of the drive for our civil team.”
An hour later, a young man named Daniel Cho arrived at my hospital room carrying a high-tech diagnostic rig. Daniel was a former law enforcement cyber-analyst who worked with domestic violence advocacy groups.
He plugged a specialized write-blocker tool into the silver laptop and powered it up using an external power source.
The screen flickered to life, showing a classic desktop background from eight years ago.
“The hard drive is intact,” Daniel reported, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “It looks like whoever tried to disable it simply unplugged the internal ribbon cable to make the power button unresponsive. They didn't destroy the memory sector.”
“Can you see the sent emails from June six years ago?” Rebecca asked.
May you like
Daniel navigated through the system logs. After a few minutes of quiet typing, he stopped.
“I found the email sent on June 14th,” Daniel said, adjusting his glasses. “And the system metadata tells a very interesting story.”
