Chapter 6 - The Locked Vault of Elias Cole
Agent Vance plugged the drive into a military-grade forensic tablet.
The screen immediately populated with encrypted directories, instantly decoded by the root key provided on the drive.
A video file appeared: DASHCAM_REAR_11122019.mp4.
The video began playing with date and time stamps.
It showed the rainy night of November 12, 2019, on the mountain road outside Aspen, Colorado. Elias Cole’s sedan was driving down the winding pass. In the rear view, a black heavy-duty pickup truck with reinforced steel brush guards was accelerating rapidly, intentionally ramming the back bumper of Elias’s vehicle three consecutive times until the sedan spun out of control, careening through the wooden guardrail and down the rocky ravine.
The truck had paused at the edge of the cliff.
Under the glare of the broken taillights, the driver had stepped out into the rain to check the wreckage below.
The camera caught the driver’s face in crystalline 4K resolution:
Marcus Kane, Victor Blackwood’s personal executive assistant.
"Dear God," Prosecutor Reed whispered, her hands shaking over the tablet. "This isn't just copyright theft. This is premeditated First-Degree Capital Murder."
May you like
"And look at the audio metadata," Maestro Vance pointed out, highlighting the musical stems. "Elias recorded his acoustic voice tracks over the symphony's baseline. There is an embedded vocal narration throughout the entire composition."
"Agent," Prosecutor Reed turned to Vance with steely resolve. "Get a federal arrest warrant signed by Judge Harrison immediately. Lock down the airport. Victor Blackwood and Marcus Kane do not leave Manhattan tonight."
