Chapter 4 - The Alibi of the Streets
David’s investigation began at the modern, glass-fronted offices of the Bel Air Security Syndicate—the private firm that managed the neighborhood’s external surveillance network. Getting the data wasn't going to be easy; the company didn't just hand over high-security camera logs to journalists without a subpoena.
But David had something better than a subpoena. He had a contact.
Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in a dimly lit coffee shop down the hill, waiting for Marcus, a senior network technician he had helped protect from a corporate whistleblowing lawsuit two years earlier. Marcus slid a black encrypted flash drive across the wooden table, hiding it beneath a napkin.
"This is the raw data for the Hayes driveway intersection from yesterday between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM," Marcus whispered, looking around nervously. "If management finds out I pulled this, I’m fired, David. But I looked at the footage myself before encrypting it. You were right. The stepson’s car left the property during the exact window he claimed he was inside managing the house servers."
"Did he go far?" David asked, pocketing the drive.
"He was gone for exactly twenty-two minutes," Marcus said. "He drove down to a private commercial complex in Beverly Hills—a place known for high-end boutique art dealers and private vault rentals. Then he sped right back up the hills, just in time to play the hero when the stepmother discovered the bracelet was missing."
David thanked Marcus, left a generous tip, and rushed back to his apartment office. He plugged the flash drive into his terminal, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he bypassed the encryption layers.
The video feed cleared. There was Julian’s sleek, midnight-blue Porsche sports car. At exactly 2:05 PM—right when Emily was at the florist and the house security cameras were conveniently dark—the Porsche tore out of the Hayes gates, its tires screeching against the asphalt.
David zoomed in on the driver's seat. Julian was behind the wheel, his face tense, clutching a small, dark velvet pouch in his right hand.
"Got you," David breathed, his heart pounding with excitement.
He tracked the vehicle’s route using the secondary city traffic intersection cameras he had access to through his media credentials. The car pulled into the underground parking structure of The Avalon Vaults—a highly exclusive, anonymous storage facility used by the city's ultra-wealthy to store untraceable assets, gold, and unregistered artwork.
Julian stayed inside the vault complex for less than ten minutes before returning to Bel Air.
David immediately realized the tactical problem. The bracelet was likely sitting inside a secure, biometric-protected private vault. Even with this video evidence, the police couldn't just drill open an anonymous vault without a specific federal warrant, and Detective Miller was too conservative to risk his career on a journalist’s theory while he already had a primary suspect with an empty box in her bag.
David needed to force Julian to reveal the bracelet himself. He needed to create an environment where Julian felt so threatened by his offshore creditors that he would have to retrieve the heirloom to liquidate it immediately.
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He pulled up his secure email client and composed a message to an anonymous digital routing address he knew Julian’s offshore brokerage firm used to communicate with their high-net-worth clients.
David smiled, a cold, predatory expression. It was time to play Julian’s own game against him.
