Chapter 6 - The Missing Phone
While Derek’s confession gave the police enough to arrest my mother and Aunt Beatrice for conspiracy and evidence tampering, they still needed to identify the actual killer Vance had sent. And we needed to prove Vance gave the order.
I remembered Lily’s exact words: Grandma took her phone away.
If my mother had Clara's phone, it meant Clara might have captured something during her final moments. I rushed back to my house with Detective Miller. The house was taped off as a crime scene, but my mother’s bedroom had barely been searched.
We tore the room apart. We checked the closets, under the mattress, inside the air vents. Nothing.
"Think like your mother," Miller said. "Where would a paranoid woman hide a piece of damning evidence?"
I stood in the center of the room, looking around. My eyes landed on a large, antique wooden jewelry box on her dresser. It was a family heirloom, supposedly passed down from my great-grandmother. It had a false bottom—a secret compartment my mother had proudly showed me when I was a boy.
I walked over, pressed the hidden latch on the back, and the bottom panel popped open.
Inside lay Clara’s smartphone. Its screen was cracked, but it still had a sliver of battery left.
"We got it," I breathed.
May you like
Miller plugged the phone into a portable evidence charger. We bypassed the lock screen using Clara's passcode—again, Lily's birthday.
In the voice memos app, there was a recording dated the night of her death. It was exactly forty-five minutes long. My hands shook as I pressed play.
