Chapter 3 - The Cloud Backup
The hospital waiting room smelled like bleach and stale coffee.
Harper had been rushed through the double doors of the intensive care unit twenty minutes ago.
I sat in a plastic chair, shivering despite the warm sweater I was wearing.
Nolan paced back and forth across the linoleum floor, still wearing his police uniform.
"I am going to find out who did this," Nolan said, punching the wall in frustration.
I stared at his back, wondering how much of this performance was real.
The paramedic's words echoed in my mind over and over again.
The poison was a police-issued beta-blocker.
Nolan was a police officer who had just lost the security footage proving who spiked the pink lemonade.
I needed to be a fraud investigator right now, not a weeping mother.
I slipped my hand into my pocket and touched Sabrina’s stolen phone, but I did not take it out.
Instead, I pulled out my own phone.
Nolan and Sabrina thought they had deleted the camera footage.
They did not know that after my years in corporate fraud, I never trusted local servers.
I had secretly routed a secondary, hidden cloud backup to my private email server three months ago.
I opened the hidden folder and downloaded the footage from the pantry camera at 3:06 p.m.
The video buffered for a second before playing on my small screen.
I watched Sabrina walk into the laundry room with Harper’s unicorn cup in her hand.
She looked over her shoulder nervously.
Then, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, unlabeled orange pill bottle.
She dumped three blue pills into the cup and stirred it violently with a plastic spoon.
My breath hitched in my throat as I secured the evidence I needed to put my sister in prison.
But the video did not end there.
Ten seconds later, the laundry room door opened again.
Nolan walked into the frame, fully dressed in his police uniform.
May you like
He looked directly at the cup, then looked up at Sabrina.
Instead of stopping her, Nolan reached into his own tactical vest, pulled out a second bottle of the blue pills, and handed it directly to my sister.
