Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Audio
The digital spectral analysis of Sloane Mercer’s leaked backup file hummed quietly on a triple-monitor setup in a windowless room three floors beneath a warehouse in South Baltimore.
A man named Vance Miller—no relation to the lieutenant—slowly dragged a vertical audio marker across a spike in the wave form. He was wearing noise-canceling headphones, his eyes fixed on the rolling text generated by a military-grade speech-recovery algorithm.
...she’s just a waitress... wait, did you see her necklace? That’s Rainer’s crest...
Vance paused the loop. He listened to the faint, scratchy audio snippet three times. A background voice in Harbor House’s kitchen, muffled by the clatter of ceramic plates and the chatter of the dining room, had dropped a name that wasn't Grace Bennett. It had dropped the name Elena Vance.
Elena Vance. The key financial witness in the federal maritime smuggling indictment against Dominic Rainer’s outer-ring associates six years ago—a woman who had supposedly drowned off the coast of Cape May when her car plunged off an unlit ferry slip, her body never recovered.
Vance leaned back in his leather chair, a slow, predatory smile creeping across his scarred face. He reached for an encrypted burner phone resting beside his mechanical keyboard.
"Well, well," Vance muttered to the empty room, his thumb hovering over the call button. "Dominic kept his prize asset hidden behind a greasy apron and a name tag all this time. Let’s see how protective the king is when the federal marshals start asking why a dead witness is serving French fries in Fells Point."
May you like
He punched in a direct-dial number linked to an internal affairs tip line at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore, waiting for the automated recording to pick up.
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