An hour had passed since Elena was thrown out into the rain. Victoria was upstairs in the master bedroom, frantically pacing back and forth while sipping red wine from a crystal glass. Lily was finally asleep in her nursery. I walked down to my private home office on the ground floor, locked the wooden door behind me, and sat down at my desk.
Mark: Let’s see what the cameras have to say.
I opened my laptop and logged into the mansion’s high-definition security system. We had sixteen cameras positioned across the estate, including two high-angle outdoor dome cameras that covered the internal court and the second-floor balcony. I pulled up the timestamp for 3:15 PM, right when the incident occurred.
Mark: What the... where is the file?
I clicked on the camera feed labeled "Upper Balcony North." The video player showed a blank dark screen with a bold yellow error icon across the center: *FILE DELETED OR CORRUPTED.*
Mark: Deleted? How could it be deleted?
My fingers flew across the keyboard as I accessed the system’s admin logs. The system recorded every single action taken on the network. I scrolled down through the server history until my eyes locked onto an entry from 3:28 PM—just ten minutes before I arrived home from my corporate law firm.
Mark: Admin User logged in from Master Bedroom iPad. Operation: Delete Video File #1049. File permanent purge complete.
My breath caught in my throat. The master bedroom iPad was Victoria’s personal device. She had manually deleted the footage from the upper balcony camera before I even walked through the front door. Why would a mother who saw a maid drop her baby delete the evidence that proved the maid's crime?
Mark: She didn't delete it to protect the maid... she deleted it to hide something else.
I grabbed my phone and quickly dialed the number for our estate’s head security technician, David.
David: Hello, Mr. Vance. Is everything alright at the house?
Mark: David, I need your help immediately. Someone accessed the cloud server from inside the house and wiped the footage from the balcony camera around 3:25 PM today.
David: Wiped it? That’s strange, sir. But our high-end package has a automatic secondary cloud backup that syncs every thirty minutes to an off-site server. The local deletion wouldn't wipe the off-site mirror unless they had my master encryption key.
Mark: Can you recover the mirror file right now and email it directly to my private server?
David: Give me two minutes, Mr. Vance. I’m pulling the mirror logs up right now.
I stood by the window, watching the rain pour down over the manicured lawn. My phone chimed with a high-priority notification. An encrypted video file had just arrived in my inbox. My hand was shaking as I clicked the file to open the video.
Leave a Comment