Chapter 3 - The Empty Mansion
At 7:00 a.m., Miles returned to his residence in the gated enclave of Highland Park, accompanied by Detective Miller and a team of forensic investigators from the Chicago Police Department.
The autumn morning was overcast, gray light filtering through the towering oak trees lining the driveway. What had once been a symbol of his hard-earned success now felt like a cold, hollow crime scene.
As Miles pushed open the heavy oak front doors, the silence of the house hit him like a physical blow.
Forensic officers in white suits began powdering the marble entryway for fingerprints. Miles walked directly down the hallway toward the closet beneath the grand staircase.
The door was wide open.
Inside, scattered across the hardwood floor, were a couple of stained blankets, a chewed plastic water bottle, and small, bloody fingernail marks carved into the interior wood of the door frame where Lily had tried to claw her way out.
Detective Miller stood beside him, watching Miles's face carefully. "She used a heavy bronze statuette from your study to wedge the door handles from the outside, Mr. Hartley. Your daughter worked that door for two days until the wood around the latch finally splinters."
Miles didn't speak. He stepped into his private study down the hall.
The room had been turned upside down. Books were pulled from the shelves, oil paintings were torn from the walls, and the reinforced steel door of his floor safe had been professionally cut open with a thermal lance.
His personal papers were gone. His late wife Eleanor's jewelry box had been emptied. But most importantly, the hidden wall panel behind the bookshelf—the panel housing his server terminal—had been violently pried open.
The master drive was missing.
"She took it," Miles said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.
"Who is she really, Miles?" Detective Miller asked, leaning against the desk. "We ran Clara Vance's name through the federal database an hour ago. The real Clara Vance died in a car accident in Seattle four years ago. This woman stole her identity."
"She was working for someone," Miles said, walking over to his desk. He reached beneath the lip of the heavy mahogany wood, pressing a concealed pressure plate that only he knew existed.
A tiny hidden drawer popped open with a faint click.
Inside lay an encrypted satellite phone and a secondary backup flash drive, mirrored to the main system sixty seconds before the server went offline.
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Miles pulled the drive out, his eyes turning cold as steel.
"She thinks she stole my network," Miles said, turning to Detective Miller. "She thinks she has the keys to Hartley Logistics. But all she stole was a honeypot trap that will trace her location the moment she tries to decrypt it."
