Chapter 2 - THE DIGITAL VAULTBy 2:00 AM, using my one allowed phone call, I hadn't called a bail bondsman or a defense attorney.
I called my private secure proxy server.
Because of my background as a forensic accountant, I had established a fully encrypted, off-site data mirror that automatically synced with Evelyn Mercer’s private digital archive every midnight. While Daniel was sleeping in my mother’s master bedroom, unaware of what true security looked like, my automated cloud backup was downloading every single file he thought he had deleted.
I scrolled through the data on my encrypted tablet screen.
There were the true banking exports showing Daniel withdrawing unauthorized funds from Mother's accounts—long before he claimed I had done it. There were the raw video files of the argument in Mother's bedroom, completely unedited, capturing the exact moment Mother shouted: "Daniel is giving me these pills! Make him stop, Claire!"
And, most importantly, there was the metadata on the "new will."
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Daniel had used a cheap PDF editor to splice together old signature files from Mother’s medical waivers, but he had failed to strip the digital author tag. The document bore his personal laptop's user ID and a time stamp corresponding to a Tuesday afternoon when I had been out of the country on a client audit.
He hadn't just framed me. He had left his digital fingerprints all over the crime scene.
