Chapter 5 - The Flash Drive
“You... you tricked me,” Abigail breathed, her voice trembling as she backed toward the consultation room door. Her manicured fingers clawed frantically at the leather strap of her handbag. “This is a conspiracy! You’re both lying! I’m calling my lawyer!”
“Go ahead and call him,” I said, pulling the digital voice recorder from my pocket and holding it up so the tiny red light caught her eye. “Or better yet, call Mrs. Smith and tell her how nobody is ever going to believe an old woman with dementia. Because I’m pretty sure the state prosecutor is going to love that audio track.”
Abigail lunged forward, desperate to snatch the recorder from my hand, but before she could cross the room, the office door swung open wide.
Two uniformed local police officers, accompanied by a state investigator I had briefed over an encrypted phone line an hour prior, stepped into the doorway, blocking every exit.
“Abigail Reynolds?” the lead investigator asked, flashing a silver shield. “You’re being detained for questioning regarding suspected elder abuse, wire fraud, and grand larceny.”
Abigail froze, her hands hovering in mid-air. The mask of the sweet, devoted suburban housewife shattered completely, replaced by a mask of cold, venomous hatred as she glared at me.
“You son of a bitch,” she hissed under her breath. “You let me think you were still that stupid, obedient soldier.”
“Deployment teaches you patience, Abigail,” I replied, stepping past her to put a protective arm around my mother’s shoulders. “And investigative work teaches you how to keep receipts.”
The officers moved in, gently taking Abigail by the arms and reading her rights as they guided her toward the hallway. She didn't fight them, but her eyes never left mine, burning with a promise of retaliation that hung heavily in the sterile air of the clinic.
As the sound of her heels clicking down the linoleum corridor faded away, the investigator turned to me, snapping his notebook shut.
May you like
“We’ve secured her laptop and frozen her secondary bank accounts,” the investigator said. “But Mr. Reynolds... you might want to look at the offshore transfer log we decrypted from her desktop five minutes ago. It wasn't just eighty thousand dollars she was trying to steal from your mother.”
My stomach tightened. “What else?”
