Part 6
Chapter 6
"Did he succeed?" I asked, though I already anticipated the answer based on Westbridge's outdated municipal infrastructure and the captain's technological incompetence.
"Not even close," Marcus chuckled grimly. "He only deleted the desktop shortcuts. The raw surveillance cache was automatically mirrored onto the county cloud server ninety seconds before."
"Play the footage from Arthur's neighborhood intersection between one-thirty and two-fifteen a.m.," I instructed, keeping my eyes fixed on the illuminated monitor screen.
The technician typed rapidly, his fingers dancing across the mechanical keys until three separate camera feeds resolved onto the high-resolution display before us.
The first feed captured Landry's unmarked black cruiser pulling into my mother's driveway at exactly 1:44 a.m., cutting its headlights fifty yards before reaching the curb.
The second feed revealed Landry entering the house through the front door using a spare key that Brooke had undoubtedly stolen from my mother's purse weeks prior.
The third feed was the definitive smoking gun: at 2:08 a.m., Landry stepped onto the front porch carrying a long, slender object wrapped in a blue kitchen towel.
He tossed the wrapped baseball bat into the trunk of his police vehicle, wiped his boots on the lawn grass, and leaned against the cruiser hood smoking a cigarette.
"He staged the bat transport in uniform," Marcus whispered, shaking his head in disgust. "The arrogance of small-town crooked cops never ceases to amaze me, Clara."
"He genuinely believed his badge made him untouchable," I replied. "Now pull the audio recording from the squad car's interior dash camera during the drive to the station."
The technician isolated the audio waveform and boosted the gain. Landry's unmistakable gravelly voice crackled through the external speakers with bone-chilling clarity.
"Just say she had an episode, Brooke," Landry's voice echoed across the precinct bullpen. "Tell the boys she swung the bat first and you had to defend yourself."
"What about Arthur?" Brooke's voice replied on the recording, sounding sharp, nervous, and manic. "What if that spineless idiot breaks down and tells the truth?"
"Arthur won't say a damn word," Landry snorted on the tape. "He knows if she goes to a state facility, he inherits the title to the lakeside property tax-free."
Arthur sat thirty feet away, listening to his wife and uncle-in-law casually discussing his complicity. He buried his head between his knees and began to sob uncontrollably.
"Did you hear that, Arthur?" I called across the room, my voice carrying cleanly over the mechanical hum of forensic machinery. "That is the price of your loyalty."
He didn't raise his head. He had sold his soul, his mother's safety, and his family's honor for a lakeside house he would now never live to inherit.
"Special Counsel," Officer Ramirez approached me hesitantly, holding a manila folder filled with handwritten notes and stamped incident reports from the past eighteen months.
"What is this, Officer Ramirez?" I asked, looking down at the thick stack of municipal documents he offered with both hands.
"This is the paper trail you're looking for, ma'am," Ramirez said earnestly. "Landry has been running an extortion ring targeting elderly homeowners across Westbridge for three years."
I opened the folder, skimming through deed transfers, forged power-of-attorney declarations, and fraudulent welfare checks bearing the rubber-stamped signatures of corrupt local officials.
"He used Brooke's real estate licensing firm to flip the properties after forcing the victims into state-run nursing homes," Ramirez explained, his voice shaking with nervous relief.
"Why didn't you report this to the state bureau earlier, officer?" Marcus asked sternly, stepping forward with his hands resting casually on his tactical vest.
"Landry threatened to frame my brother on drug distribution charges if I stepped out of line," Ramirez confessed quietly. "He owned the local magistrate and the district attorney."
"The district attorney resigned twenty minutes ago after federal marshals raided his residence in the capital," Marcus informed him smoothly. "Your brother is completely safe."
Ramirez let out a long, ragged exhale, looking as though a mountain had been lifted from his chest. "Thank God. I couldn't live with this poison anymore."
"Your cooperation will be formally noted in the state's charging documents, Officer Ramirez," I told him. "Cooperation now is the only path toward retaining your badge."
He nodded gratefully and stepped aside to assist the state troopers in cataloging the recovered bank records and falsified affidavits stacked inside Landry's personal desk drawers.
I walked over to Brooke, who sat slumped in a plastic chair near the booking counter, her hair disheveled and mascara streaking down her powdered cheeks.
"You really thought you could pull this off, didn't you, Brooke?" I asked softly, looking down at the woman who had tried to destroy my mother.
May you like
She glared up at me with venom burning in her eyes. "Your mother is an obstacle, Clara. She sat on two million dollars in prime real estate while Arthur struggled!"
—END OF Chapter 6,
