Chapter 2 - The Glitch in the Cloud|
Ricardo sprinted back to the apartment, taking the stairs two at a time. He burst through the front door, slamming the deadbolt shut and throwing the heavy chain lock into place.
Bia looked up from the living room rug, a slice of pizza paused halfway to her mouth. She was eleven now, her eyes sharp and perceptive, carrying too much of her mother’s intuition.
“Where’s the pizza?” she asked, frowning.
“I had to run back. Forgot my wallet,” Ricardo lied smoothly, though his chest heaved with every breath.
“You’re sweating, Uncle Rick. It’s freezing outside.”
“I took the stairs. Good for the cardio.”
He walked directly into his home office and locked the door behind him. The man in the gray coat had successfully retrieved the broken phone. Why? It was completely fried. The motherboard had been drilled through by the police forensics team before they returned it. There was no data left on the physical hardware.
Unless the hardware wasn't the target.
Ricardo fired up his laptop and logged into the secure, encrypted cloud server where he had archived Camila’s original audio recordings. He typed in his thirty-character passphrase and waited for the dashboard to load.
The screen blinked, loading the familiar files: Audio_1.wav, Audio_2.wav, Medical_Records.pdf.
Everything looked perfectly normal. Ricardo let out a long exhale, rubbing his temples. He was just being paranoid. The man at the bin was probably just a scavenger looking for scrap lithium batteries.
Then, a tiny notification bell chimed in the upper right corner of the screen.
Last Access: Today, 7:14 PM. IP Address: Unknown.
Ricardo’s stomach plummeted. He hadn't logged into this server in over six months.
He clicked on the access log. Someone had downloaded the entire directory just ten minutes ago. But worse than that, there was a new folder sitting at the bottom of the directory. A folder Ricardo had never created.
May you like
It was titled: You Missed Something.
He double-clicked the folder. Inside was a single, heavily encrypted audio file. The date stamp on the file was from the exact night Camila had died.
