Chapter 6 - True Colors
Hearing Ryan’s real voice—not the polished, charismatic facade he wore for Thanksgiving dinners and family photos—sent a cold shiver down my spine.
"It's in my bag, Ryan," I answered, keeping my tone deliberately steady. "Why are you screaming at me?"
"You're lying," he hissed. "I just checked the remote handshake logs. The trigger executed at midnight, but the local handshake didn't originate from Jenna's IP address. It didn't route through her residential gateway at all. The script pinged an unregistered node. Where are you?"
My heart slammed against my ribs. He had built telemetry into the laptop. He was tracking its digital location in real time.
Detective Perez immediately grabbed a notepad, scribbled something in bold black ink, and shoved it across the table into my line of sight:
*KEEP HIM TALKING. GET HIM TO ADMIT ACCESS.*
"I don't know what an IP address is, Ryan!" I yelled back, feigning hysterical tears. "I went to the convenience store by High Street to get snacks! I had my bag with me! What did you do to that computer? Why are you acting like a psycho?"
A pause stretched over the line. For five agonizing seconds, I thought he was going to hang up and run.
Instead, his arrogance won out. Ryan had never believed anyone in the family was smarter than him, especially not his younger sister.
"You listen to me, you little idiot," Ryan whispered, the venom in his words dripping through the line. "If that laptop connects to a public network without the VPN tunnel I configured, my life is over. Do you hear me? *My life.* Dad and Mom put their retirement into keeping the auditors off my back for six months. If I go down, the house goes, their pensions go, everything goes!"
"Then why did you give it to me?" I cried out, the pain in my voice no longer entirely faked. "Why did you put my name on the account?"
"Because nobody sends an eighteen-year-old girl with zero criminal history to federal prison!" Ryan spat. "You would have gotten probation! A deferred sentence! Maybe community service! I'm facing fifteen to twenty years in a medium-security penitentiary! You were supposed to be our shield, Emily! That's what family does! We protect each other!"
Across the table, Agent Cross smiled a cold, razor-thin smile. He signaled to Detective Vance, who picked up his desk landline and whispered:
"Dispatch, notify the staging unit. We have full verbal confession and admission of criminal conspiracy on a recorded line. Execute the entry warrant on Maple Street immediately."
"Emily?" Ryan's voice cracked on the line, suddenly realizing what he had just admitted out loud to someone who wasn't panicking the way she was supposed to. "Emily... who are you with?"
"Happy birthday to me, Ryan," I whispered.
May you like
And I hung up the phone.
***
