Chapter 4 - The Blood on the Telemetry Page
My hands went cold as I stood under the chandelier of the guest suite staring at the yellow metallurgical report Danny Vance had hidden inside the back cover of my third journal.
Two years ago at the rainy Indianapolis qualifying trials, a horrific two-car collision on Turn Three had sent both my husband Chase and his twenty-two-year-old rookie teammate spinning into the concrete retaining barrier at a hundred and ninety miles per hour.
Chase had suffered a severe concussion and broken ribs, while the twenty-two-year-old rookie in Car Twelve had suffered a crushed thoracic vertebra that left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Until this exact second, the entire racing world—including me—had believed that a defective factory brake line on the rookie’s car had snapped on the wet track and clipped Chase’s rear bumper by sheer tragic coincidence.
Now I was holding a certified microscopic tool-mark analysis proving that the titanium brake line on Car Twelve had been scored eighty percent through with a custom vanadium wire cutter bearing the serial notch of Chase Whitaker’s personal pit-box kit!
Even more terrifying, I suddenly remembered the last name of that twenty-two-year-old rookie driver whose career and spine had been shattered on Turn Three two years ago.
His name was Eli DeSantis—Matteo’s younger brother!
I did not wait until morning.
Clutching the yellow lab report in my hand, I walked barefoot down the obsidian hallway of the penthouse and knocked sharply on the heavy walnut doors of Matteo’s private study.
When Matteo pulled the door open in his white shirtsleeves, I looked past his shoulder into the study and saw a framed photograph sitting beside his computer monitor—showing Matteo with his arm around a smiling young man sitting in a custom carbon-fiber racing wheelchair.
"You never cared about sponsoring Whitaker Motorsports when I walked into your office six weeks ago, did you, Matteo," I said quietly as I held up Danny Vance’s yellow metallurgical report between us.
Matteo’s dark eyes dropped to the yellow lab sheet in my hand, and every muscle in his tall frame went rigid as stone.
"Where did you get that report," Matteo asked in a voice that sounded like grinding tectonic plates.
"Chase’s former chief mechanic Danny Vance hid it inside the back lining of my third telemetry book the day before Chase fired him last week, and until two minutes ago I had no idea that your brother Eli’s crash two years ago wasn’t an accident," I told him, meeting his intense gaze without flinching.
Matteo took the yellow sheet from my fingers, scanned the microscopic tool-mark findings under his desk lamp, and let out a long, ragged breath that carried two years of volcanic grief.
"Eli was faster than Chase in every single practice session that spring, and the team owners were forty-eight hours away from naming Eli their primary number-one driver over your husband when that brake line snapped on Turn Three," Matteo said quietly.
"When you came to my office six weeks ago to pitch a sponsorship for Chase, I suspected you were covering for him—until my investigators watched you for three weeks and realized you had worked yourself to the bone paying his hospital bills without having the slightest clue what kind of monster was sleeping next to you," Matteo admitted, stepping close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his chest.
"Danny Vance noted at the bottom of this sheet that the raw black-box ECU telemetry module taken from Eli’s wrecked car—which proves Chase intentionally tapped Eli’s rear quarter-panel at the exact second the scored brake line gave way—is still hidden inside the biometric floor safe at our Highland Park house," I said urgently.
At nine o’clock the next morning, flanked by Matteo, two Highland Park police officers, and Matteo’s powerhouse corporate legal team, I walked right back up the stone steps of the Highland Park estate wearing a sharp ivory wool coat and Matteo’s black-diamond ring blazing on my left hand.
Chase and Brielle were waiting in the foyer with Chase’s slimy defense lawyer, and Brielle still had the audacity to be wearing my cream silk robe while sporting a fake gauze bandage wrapped around her right wrist.
"Officers, arrest this woman immediately for domestic battery—last night before she stormed out of the house to meet her lover, she attacked me on the stairs with a kitchen knife and cut my wrist," Brielle cried out dramatically as she pointed at me.
Matteo did not even blink as his lead attorney handed the Highland Park police sergeant an encrypted tablet playing the high-definition cloud backup from our own foyer Nest security camera—which Chase had forgotten was registered to my private consulting email!
On the screen, the police sergeant watched Chase viciously slap me twice across the face, throw the garbage bag at my feet, and shout "Look what you made me do" while Brielle stood smirking on the stairs without a scratch on her wrist!
"Miss Sutton, filing a false felony police report is a Class-Four crime in Illinois, and Mister Whitaker, you are officially served with an emergency order of protection vacating your right to prevent Mrs. Whitaker from emptying her personal safe upstairs," the sergeant barked as Chase’s lawyer turned pale.
With the police guarding the bottom of the stairs and Matteo standing like an iron wall beside the bedroom doorway, I walked into the master closet, forced a trembling Brielle to strip off my cream silk robe on the spot, and spun the combination on the bedroom floor safe.
Inside lay my mother’s heirloom jewelry, my consulting tax tokens, and a brushed-steel memory drive labeled "INDY 2024 — CAR 12 RAW ECU."
However, attached to the steel memory drive was a sticky note written in Danny Vance’s handwriting stating that the decryption key for the black box was stored at his South Side repair shop on Halsted Street.
Twenty minutes later, as Matteo’s Maybach raced down to Halsted Street so we could get the decryption key from Danny before tonight’s gala, we turned into the alley behind Danny’s garage and saw gray exhaust smoke pouring from beneath the locked steel bay doors!
Matteo and Luca kicked open the side service door and we rushed inside to find a four-ton hydraulic car lift deliberately sabotaged—its safety pins sheared off so a vintage muscle car had dropped onto Danny Vance’s legs, pinning him to the oil-slicked floor while the running engine filled the sealed garage with lethal carbon monoxide!
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As Matteo and Luca used an emergency pneumatic jack to lift the crushing weight off the bleeding mechanic and drag him into the fresh air before the ambulance arrived, Danny grabbed my coat lapel with a grease-stained hand and gasped a warning that stopped my heart cold.
"Vivian, it wasn’t Chase who cut my lift cables thirty minutes ago—it was Brielle Sutton’s brother, and before they dropped that car on me to steal the decryption key, they said tonight at the Motorsports Gala they aren’t going to wait for Friday’s bank default... they planted a high-speed brake-fluid bleed valve inside the demonstrator car Matteo’s brother Eli is scheduled to hand-control around the indoor exhibition track at eight o’clock tonight to finish what Chase started two years ago!"
