Chapter 4 - The Footage and the Unseen GuestDetective Miller placed the tablet on the desk and hit play.
The grainy, high-definition body-cam footage started. It was terrifying. You could hear the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, and my mother’s voice echoing through the house: "This is what you get, Maya! You self-centered bitch! You ruined Clara's life!"
The camera panned around the corner, showing my father swinging a wooden bat into a glass coffee table while Michael—who had been waiting in a getaway car and was arrested shortly after—could be seen through the broken front door, yelling at them to hurry up.
Then, the camera caught something that made my blood run cold.
In the reflection of a large, unbroken wall mirror in the background, behind where my father was smashing a lamp, stood a shadow. It wasn't the police. It wasn't the woman who lived there.
It was a man in a dark hoodie, standing at the top of the stairs, holding a heavy black duffel bag. The moment the police burst through the front door, the man in the hoodie quietly slipped out through an upper balcony door, completely unnoticed by the officers who were busy tackling my screaming parents.
I pointed at the screen. "Wait. Pause it. Who is that?"
Detective Miller frowned, leaning closer to the screen. He zoomed in on the reflection. His face went pale. "What the..."
"That isn't the homeowner's husband," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. "And he was coming down from the attic."
"Hold on," Miller said, quickly grabbing his desk phone and dialing a number. "Dispatch, pull up the inventory report from the Elm Street break-in. Did the homeowner report anything stolen besides the property damage?"
He waited, listening intently to the earpiece. His eyes widened slowly as he looked up at me.
"The homeowner says nothing was stolen," Miller whispered. "But the previous owner before you... Maya, who did you sell that house to two years ago?"
"I sold it to an LLC," I said, my mind racing. "A real estate holding company called Apex Horizons. They renovated it and flipped it to the current young family."
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Miller’s face grew grim. "Apex Horizons... Maya, that’s a front company for a massive money-laundering syndicate we’ve been investigating for six months. Your parents didn't just break into a stranger's house..."
He looked at the tablet screen where the hooded man was escaping into the night. "...They just interrupted a multi-million-dollar cartel drop. And whatever was in that duffel bag is now missing."
