The bell above the door jingled, a tinny sound that barely cut through the low hum of fluorescent lights. The repair shop was called “Kross Signals,” a single, grimy window front tucked between a halal butcher and a dry cleaner on a quiet stretch of West Chicago. Inside, the air smelled like soldering flux and old coffee.
Dust motes danced in the weak afternoon sun filtering through the window.
A man with a wild shock of gray hair and safety glasses perched on his nose looked up from a dismantled laptop. His name was Leo Kross, a contact I’d found through an obscure online forum for audio forensics. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“You the lawyer?” he asked, his voice gravelly.
I nodded, clutching the unmarked USB drive in my hand. “Marcus Bennett.”
He gestured vaguely with a screwdriver towards a worn armchair covered in wires. “Take a seat. What’s the damage?”
I sat, the springs groaning beneath me. “It’s an audio file. Encrypted, modulated. I need to know where it came from.”
Leo pushed a stack of circuit boards aside, clearing a small space on his cluttered workbench. He had three monitors glowing, displaying complex waveforms and lines of code.
“You got the raw file?” he asked, his eyes already on the USB drive.
“As raw as it gets.” I handed it over.
He plugged it into a port on a beast of a machine. His fingers flew across the keyboard, a blur of motion. I watched the green lines of data stream across his screen, his intensity absolute.
“Most people want voices cleaned up for court,” Leo muttered, not looking at me. “Or they want to know if their ex is cheating. Rarely the source.”
“This isn’t about an ex.”
He didn’t respond, his focus entirely on the screen. The custom hydraulic elevator chime I’d isolated still echoed in my mind, a phantom sound from my own firm. That detail had led me here, away from official channels, because something felt profoundly wrong.
Minutes stretched into a tense silence, punctuated only by the whirring of Leo’s computer fans and the distant wail of a siren.
Then, Leo stopped typing. His hand hovered over the mouse.
He turned to me, his expression unreadable. “This isn’t just a file. It’s got layers.”
“What kind of layers?” I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach.
“Digital metadata. Deeply buried, but it’s there. Like a ghost in the machine.” He pointed to a small block of text that appeared on one of his screens. “It wasn’t just sent from an executive suite. It was created there. Specifically, from an internal IP address.”
My breath hitched. “Which IP address?”
Leo Kross leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. “192.168.1.103.” He looked directly at me. “That address, according to the network protocols, is assigned exclusively to Julian Bennett.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. Julian. My son. The rising star at the firm. The thought was so absurd, so utterly monstrous, that my mind scrambled to reject it. It had to be a mistake. A hack. A frame-up.
But Leo’s face held no doubt. He simply watched me, waiting for the information to sink in.
“That’s impossible,” I managed to say, the sound thin.
“The data doesn’t lie,” he replied, pragmatic as ever. “It’s stamped with that internal address. Generated, not just forwarded, from that exact station.”
My son. The extortionist. The one who knew about Sarah’s accident. The world tilted on its axis.
Just as the horror began to truly set in, my firm-issued phone, vibrating silently in my pocket, suddenly flashed on the table beside me. The screen lit up with a notification from the state bar association.
An automated court filing. For me.
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