Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Hunting for Clues in the Dark
That night, as Renata’s soft snores filled the bedroom, Andrés quietly slipped out of bed. He crept into the home office and booted up the house's security system.
The dashboard showed that all camera footage from the past three months had been completely wiped clean, leaving not a single trace. However, Renata was unaware that the cloud storage account retained a separate access log. The cold, hard lines of code on the screen clearly indicated that all deletion commands and camera deactivations originated from the IP address of Renata’s personal laptop.
Digging deeper, he accessed his mother’s email account, which Renata had taken upon herself to change the password for. He discovered that all of Doña Teresa’s monthly bank statements were set up to automatically forward to Renata's private inbox. More alarming still was a confirmation notice for a change of mailing address with the bank, and a suspicious transfer request for a massive sum of 950,000 pesos to an unknown account—a transaction that Doña Teresa, frugal by nature, would never have authorized.
When Andrés was a restless twelve-year-old boy fascinated by electronics, he had secretly planted a small recording device under the dining table to eavesdrop on his older sister’s phone calls with her boyfriend. Now, that childish prank served as the blueprint for a much darker mission.
He retrieved a military-grade, ultra-micro listening device from his tactical backpack. He carefully mounted it in a blind spot under the dining table, the exact spot where Renata frequently sat to work and entertain guests.
Next, he changed the Wi-Fi router password, set up SMS alerts for any bank transactions, and downloaded all suspicious digital backups onto an encrypted external hard drive.
Finally, he opened his email and drafted a message to his commanding officer, requesting an emergency one-week leave of absence due to "critical family matters."
Once everything was in place, and confirming Renata was still deep in sleep, he tiptoed back to the room where his mother was imprisoned. Using a spare key he had quietly cut earlier that evening, he opened the door.
Doña Teresa was still awake, her eyes glowing in the darkness.
"Tomorrow, you must pretend to be confused and disoriented in front of her," he whispered, holding his mother's frail hand.
She looked down at the bruises on her wrists, then up at her only son.
"How confused?" she asked, a hint of irony lacing her tone.
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Andrés did not smile.
It was she who smiled. A cold, calm, fiercely proud smile of a mother who knew exactly what her son was capable of. That smile was the first undeniable sign that Renata had made a fatal error in choosing her victims; she still had no idea who she was truly up against.
