Chapter 4 - The Ghost of Manhattan
We couldn't take a flight, a train, or a commercial bus. Every credit card transaction under my name was a beacon for federal agents.
I sold my gold Breitling watch—a gift from Vanguard for twenty years of service—to a shady pawnshop near Denver's Colfax Avenue for four thousand dollars in cash. I bought an old, rusted 2008 Subaru Outback from a private seller on Craigslist, paid cash, and attached a set of temporary plates.
For thirty straight hours, Emily and I took turns driving across the frozen heartland of America, avoiding interstate weigh stations and toll roads, heading straight back to New York.
While Emily slept in the passenger seat with Maya strapped securely into a newly purchased car seat, I made one phone call using a burn phone I had bought at a truck stop.
I called Sarah Jennings.
Sarah was Vanguard's former Head of Cybersecurity—a brilliant, cynical woman whom I had personally saved from being fired three years ago when she blew the whistle on executive expense fraud. She now ran a private digital forensics firm out of a basement loft in Brooklyn.
"David?" Sarah’s raspy voice came through the speaker. "Every news portal in Illinois has your mugshot on the front page. They're calling you the 'Logistics Bandit'."
"I need your help, Sarah," I said, staring at the white lines of the highway cutting through the darkness. "I have the victim, I have the motive, but I need the digital smoking gun."
"Jason Miller is smart, David," Sarah warned. "I looked into his digital footprint the second your name popped up on the news wire. He wiped his primary servers in Manhattan yesterday morning. He left a paper trail that points straight to your computer."
"He forgot a secondary laptop," Emily’s quiet voice broke in from the passenger side. She had woken up. "Sarah... he keeps an encrypted offline hard drive in a wall safe behind the mahogany cabinet in our Manhattan penthouse."
Sarah whistled low. "An offline vault. If he kept local backups of the transfers before he altered them to frame your dad, that drive has his real IP address."
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"The penthouse is sealed by the NYPD," I said grimly. "There are probably officers monitoring the street."
"Then we better break into a crime scene," Sarah replied with a dark laugh. "Come to my loft in Brooklyn first. I have the gear you'll need."
