Chapter 5 - The Audit
Dawn broke gray and miserable over Cedar Point, washing the coastal highway in a blanket of heavy morning mist.
I left Hannah resting under the watchful eye of a trusted family friend at a secure motel downtown, telling her I needed to pick up some clothes from her house. I didn’t tell her my first stop wasn’t her house, but rather Travis Cole’s downtown real estate office.
The office was located in a sleek, modern glass building overlooking the marina. At 7:30 AM, the lobby was completely deserted. The cleaning crew had left an hour ago, and the business day hadn’t yet begun.
Using a set of master impression tools that had remained locked in a grease-stained toolbox in my garage workshop for over a decade, I bypassed the electronic deadbolt on Travis’s private office door in less than twelve seconds.
The room smelled of expensive cologne, stale espresso, and desperation.
I didn’t turn on the overhead lights. I walked straight to his mahogany desk, booted up his desktop computer using a password hint I had casually overheard him bragging about at a Christmas party two years ago—his dog’s birthday combined with his golf handicap—and plugged a high-speed encrypted flash drive into the USB port.
If the police financial investigators needed months to untangle his digital footprint, I didn’t. My old training included advanced signals intelligence and data exploitation.
Within four minutes, my portable drive had downloaded every encrypted hard drive partition, offshore shell company ledger, text message archive, and deleted email file on his machine.
As the progress bar ticked toward one hundred percent, a series of automated text message backups popped up on the desktop sync window.
My eyes scanned the screen, and my breath caught.
Travis hadn’t just taken out an insurance policy. He had been communicating with someone named Marcus Vance—a notorious local loan shark tied to illicit gambling rings in Wilmington.
The most recent message, sent just twelve hours before the attack, read: “Get it done tonight. Make it look like a tragic home invasion during the storm. The payout clears the debt and leaves us fifty-fifty.”
A cold fury settled into my bones. Travis wasn’t just planning to murder my daughter for insurance money; he had outsourced the final act to a professional criminal associate while he played the grieving husband.
I yanked the flash drive from the port, wiped my digital footprint clean from the system logs with a specialized deletion script, and slipped out of the office just as the first junior associate walked down the hallway holding a cup of takeout coffee.
“Morning, Mr. Mercer,” the young man blinked in surprise, seeing an older man in a flannel shirt walking out of his boss’s private office.
May you like
“Morning,” I replied calmly, adjusting my cap. “Travis left his boat engine keys in my garage. I was dropping them off on my desk.”
The associate nodded gullibly, completely unaware that he had just crossed paths with a ghost.
