Chapter 5 - Someone Was Cleaning Up

I drove straight from the hospital to Sterling Meridian headquarters with Detective Ortiz and two cybercrime investigators.

The building was mostly empty. Cleaning crews moved through the lobby while the morning news played silently on wall-mounted screens.

My badge opened every executive door.

Or it was supposed to.

When I reached the records floor, the system rejected me.

"Credentials revoked at 4:22 A.M.," the security director said, staring at his tablet. "By an administrator account."

"Whose account?"

He swallowed. "Grant Hale's."

We entered with a master override.

My private records room looked untouched.

That bothered me more than a mess would have.

On my desk sat one paper cup of coffee, still warm.

Ortiz touched the side with a gloved finger.

"Whoever was here didn't leave long ago."

The investigators pulled access logs. At 4:17, my credentials had opened the room. At 4:19, an external drive had been connected to my workstation. At 4:21, forty-three files were deleted.

"Can you recover them?" I asked.

"Probably," the cyber specialist said. "But whoever did this knew exactly what to target."

My chief operating officer, Evan Rusk, arrived looking pale.

"What the hell happened at your house?" he asked.

News had already leaked.

A local blog headline read: BILLIONAIRE CEO HAS MOTHER ARRESTED AFTER FAMILY DISPUTE.

Below it was a photograph of Alora leaving a restaurant months earlier.

"That photo wasn't public," I said.

Evan frowned. "How do you know?"

"Because I took it."

It had been stored in my private cloud account.

The same account where my 4K recording had automatically synced.

My phone buzzed again.

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

A text appeared:

You think a video saves you? You have no idea how much we already have.

Then another message arrived.

It contained a photograph of Alora lying in the hospital bed.

Taken less than an hour earlier.

I called the hospital immediately.

A nurse answered, breathless.

"Mr. Sterling, security is already on the floor. Someone tried to enter your wife's room using a fake medical badge."

I stopped breathing.

"Where is Alora now?"

The nurse didn't answer right away.

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