Chapter 12 - The Cracking Wall
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At 11:30 p.m. that same night, my secure phone line buzzed with an incoming call from a payphone number in downtown Denver.
I answered guardedly. "Hello?"
"Evan?" a terrified, breathless voice whispered. It was Celeste.
"Celeste? Where are you?"
"I'm at a gas station near the interstate," she sobbed, the sound of passing highway traffic loud in the background. "Grant doesn't know I left the house. His lawyers forced me to sign a recantation statement today! They're going to claim I made up the abuse allegations because I was having a mental breakdown!"
"Don't sign anything else, Celeste," I urged her. "Go to Detective Reed. He will protect you."
"You don't understand what he has, Evan!" she cried out. "He has everything! He recorded every room in the mansion! He has cloud backups of all the internal security feeds on a hidden server in his office!"
I froze. "Internal camera footage of the house?"
"Yes! He called it 'family risk monitoring.' He kept video archives of everything that happened in the house for the last three years—including... including what he did to Lila in the study."
My heart pounded against my ribs like a sledgehammer. "Celeste, listen to me very carefully. Do you know the access key or the server address for those archives?"
"I heard him give the encryption key to his security chief last month," she whimpered, her voice breaking. "It was his old military unit callsign... Vanguard-Nine-Zero."
"Where is the physical server hosted?"
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"It's a private server bank in his downtown office building on 17th Street," she revealed. "Evan, please... don't let him get away with this. He threatened to take Lila away from both of us forever."
"He won't," I swore to her. "Get to the police station now."
