Ramirez glanced at the principal, then back at me. “The IT technician down there says the server rack for the eastern staircase cameras was physically unplugged and the hard drives were wiped exactly twenty minutes ago—just before you arrived. Someone manually deleted the primary evidence.”
Richard stopped dialing his phone. A slow, sinister smile began to creep back onto his face. The panic in his eyes vanished, replaced once again by the calculating arrogance of a man who thought he had just found his escape hatch.
“Well, well,” Richard whispered, stepping forward, his voice dripping with malice. “A confession without physical corroboration? A mother’s word against a child’s? And look at that… the security footage is gone. Accidents happen with technology all the time, Elena. Without that video, you have nothing but a recording of a scared child being coerced by a intimidating judge.”
He leaned in close, his eyes gleaming with a terrifying confidence.
“You think you won because of a badge? This is my city. And you just made the biggest mistake of your life.”
But as Richard smiled, my mind flashed back to the hallway outside the staircase. I remembered the small, unnoticeable detail I had spotted on my way into the building—a detail that neither Richard, the principal, nor the person who wiped the servers had accounted for.
I looked at Richard, matching his smile with a cold, unwavering stare of my own.
“You think you’re the only one who knows how to play this game, Richard?” I murmured. “Open the blinds.”
