Chapter 5 - The Evidence Room
I closely followed David through the utterly chaotic and crowded hallways of the Westbridge precinct.
Dozens of federal agents were aggressively seizing hard drives, heavy filing cabinets, and duty weapons from the shocked local officers.
Captain Ross was currently screaming vicious obscenities while being tightly handcuffed to a heavy steel booking desk.
David handed me a sealed plastic bag containing my confiscated belongings and softly asked if I was physically hurt.
I told him my professional pride was bruised, but my total focus remained entirely on saving my mother.
We walked swiftly and directly toward the secure evidence room that I had observed earlier that evening.
The heavy metal door was now firmly secured with a massive, industrial-grade padlock.
David effortlessly used a pair of heavy bolt cutters to snap the lock, violently pushing the door wide open.
The windowless room smelled intensely like damp cardboard, rust, and old chemical cleaning solvents.
I immediately started tearing through the dusty boxes labeled for the current year, desperately looking for the stolen files.
David meticulously checked the precinct's digital evidence log on a confiscated police tablet.
He quickly noticed a massive, glaring discrepancy in the precinct's chain of custody reports over the last decade.
Hundreds of high-value items belonging to deceased elderly victims had been logged in but suspiciously never logged out.
Ross had not just been stealing from my wealthy mother.
He had been aggressively running a massive, highly organized extortion ring targeting vulnerable seniors for years.
He deliberately manufactured false criminal charges against their terrified caretakers, forcing them to surrender their assets as "evidence."
I suddenly spotted a heavy metal lockbox shoved deeply beneath a pile of moldy, discarded blankets in the far corner.
I violently smashed the rusty hinges with a heavy fire extinguisher and frantically pried the lid open.
Inside the box were dozens of forged property deeds, blank cashier checks, and stolen passports.
I frantically dug to the very bottom, desperately praying to find my mother's original will and offshore trust documents.
My trembling hand unexpectedly brushed against a highly familiar, worn leather-bound ledger.
It was my mother's private, deeply personal diary, the exact one she had kept meticulously hidden since I was a child.
I carefully opened it to the last marked page, my blood running instantly, terrifyingly cold.
The final, lengthy entry was written entirely in my brother Michael's distinct, messy handwriting.
The horrifying entry detailed a carefully planned, month-long schedule for slowly poisoning my mother.
The precise dosage amounts listed were for lethal injections of a prescription heart medication called digitalis.
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Michael was not just a cowardly, passive bystander desperately protecting Dana from the police.
My brother was the one actively and methodically trying to stop my mother's heart.
