Leo Driscoll bought a crashed 2012 sedan at a county auto auction for $850 to salvage its engine.
The discovery of the hidden cash and the Moretti ledger card ignited a new fire in Maya. She immediately set to work on the encrypted card, but it was heavily secured.
“This isn’t a simple password,” she explained, gesturing at her screen filled with complex algorithms. “It’s industrial-grade encryption. This is going to take time, possibly days.”
Meanwhile, she focused on the other critical piece of evidence: the deleted text thread from Julian’s phone, the one pleading for protection from “Captain.”
“I’m going to pull the cell tower data for those messages,” Maya declared, her eyes gleaming with determination. “We can pinpoint exactly where they were sent from.”
She accessed a database typically reserved for law enforcement, a digital map that tracked cell tower pings. She cross-referenced the time stamps of Julian’s desperate texts with the geographical coordinates of active cell towers.
Hours passed. The garage slowly emptied, leaving just the three of us and Toby, who snored softly in his bed. Maya’s screen glowed in the growing darkness.
Suddenly, she let out a sharp intake of breath. “Leo, look at this.”
I walked over, peering at the detailed map on her laptop. A red dot glowed brightly over a specific cell tower in downtown Newark.
“This is the tower that relayed Julian’s texts to ‘Captain’,” Maya explained, her finger tapping the screen. “Right here. The messages were sent from this exact location.”
“Okay,” I said, “so Julian was in Newark when he sent them. What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” Maya replied, her voice dropping to a low, intense whisper, “is that Marcus Brody was documented attending a public court hearing in Trenton on that exact day, at that exact time. More than an hour’s drive away.”
My jaw went slack. The blood drained from my face.
“Someone else sent those texts,” I whispered, the implication hitting me like a physical blow. “Someone else had Julian’s phone. Someone who wanted it to look like Marcus was threatening Julian in Newark, while Marcus was publicly accounted for in Trenton.”
The carefully constructed narrative of Marcus as the murderer crumbled around me. He hadn’t sent those texts. He hadn’t been there. The texts weren’t Julian’s cry for help against Marcus. They were a setup. A frame.
But by whom? And why?
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