Chapter 3 - The Legal Wall
The next morning, the precinct felt like a war zone.
I was confined to desk duty, staring at a blank computer screen. The warrant had been approved by a sympathetic judge at 5:00 a.m., and forensics had swarmed the mansion.
They had the camera. But Vance was already working his dark magic in the courthouse.
“He’s filing an emergency injunction,” Captain Holt told me, leaning against my desk with a tired sigh. “Vance is claiming the camera was placed illegally. Two-party consent laws, Lena. He's saying Mara didn't have the right to film him in a private space without his knowledge.”
“It’s her house too!” I slammed my hand on the desk. “She was recording her own abuse to save her life!”
“The law is muddy, and Vance has a lot of money to make it muddier,” Holt warned. “If the judge suppresses that video, we have no case. It's his word against an unconscious woman's.”
I felt a cold dread wash over me.
I grabbed my coat. If the law was going to protect a monster, I had to find a different way to cage him. I needed leverage. I needed to know who Evan really was when the doors were closed, before Mara ever met him.
I spent the next ten hours digging into archives, pulling old police reports, and making calls to out-of-state precincts. Men like Evan didn't start their violence at thirty-five. It was a pattern. It was a sickness.
By midnight, I found it.
An old, sealed complaint from a college town in Massachusetts, ten years ago. A woman named Sarah Jenkins had filed a temporary restraining order against Evan. Two days later, it was mysteriously dropped. Sarah dropped out of school and vanished from the public eye.
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I tracked down her current address. She was living three states away, under her maiden name.
I wasn't a detective on this case anymore. I was a sister. And I was going to pay Sarah Jenkins a visit.
