Part 4
By seven o'clock that morning, the hospital room was filled with the weak, gray light of a rainy Chicago dawn. Sophie was sitting up in bed, color slowly returning to her cheeks as she color-coded a drawing with some crayons a kind nurse had brought her. I had managed to wash the dried blood from my hands, but the stain on my dress remained, a grim reminder of the war I was about to wage.
Mark had left two hours ago to file the emergency motion at the Cook County Courthouse. I knew I couldn't just sit there and wait for the legal system to slowly turn its gears. My father was a legal apex predator; he knew how to exploit every loophole, delay every hearing, and tie up every asset until his opponents died of exhaustion. If I wanted to save the evidence that would destroy Preston’s lie, I had to act on my own terms.
I called an old friend from my university days, Maya Lin. Maya didn't work in law or finance; she was a senior cybersecurity consultant for a major tech firm in the Loop, and more importantly, she harbored a deep, abiding hatred for the entitled elite of Chicago.
Thirty minutes later, Maya walked into the hospital room, carrying a heavy laptop bag and two large cups of strong coffee. She didn't ask questions about my family; she simply walked over to Sophie, gave her a gentle high-five, and then turned to me with a fierce, no-nonsense look.
"Mark called me," Maya said, handing me a coffee. "He told me what that pathetic excuse of a brother did. Evelyn, I’m so sorry. But we don't have time to cry. We need to move."
"What’s the plan?" I asked, taking a grateful sip of the scalding liquid. "Mark is getting a subpoena, but my father has the hotel management in his pocket. If they get a hint that a legal order is coming, that footage will be wiped from the server, and they’ll blame a routine digital overwrite."
"Exactly," Maya said, opening her laptop on the small overbed table. "Most modern hotels, especially luxury ones like the Whitmore, use a centralized cloud-based surveillance system managed by a third-party security firm. Even if the hotel manager wants to delete a file, they usually have to submit a request to the main server tech, or they have a local digital video recorder—an NVR—on-site that syncs to the cloud every twelve hours."
She tapped rapidly on her keyboard, her screen filling with lines of code and network diagnostics that looked like Greek to me.
"The wedding ended around midnight," Maya continued, her eyes reflecting the glow of the monitor. "The local network at the Whitmore backs up its footage to the cloud storage facility at 6:00 AM every day. That means the raw, unedited footage of the ballroom entrance from last night is currently sitting on both the hotel's local server and the secure cloud network."
"Can you get it?" I asked, my heart thumping against my ribs.
"Directly hacking a secure corporate server is illegal, Evelyn, and your father would use that to throw us both in jail and exclude the evidence in court," Maya said, pausing to look at me with a mischievous glint in her eyes. "But we don't need to hack it. We just need to stop them from deleting it before Mark’s subpoena arrives. And I know the guy who manages the night-shift IT infrastructure for the Whitmore’s security contractor. He owes me a massive favor from a data recovery gig last year."
She picked up her phone and dialed a number, putting it on speaker. After three rings, a sleepy, gravelly voice answered. "Maya? It’s seven in the morning. Why are you calling me?"
"Leo, wake up. I need a major favor, and it involves a child safety issue," Maya said, her voice dropping all pleasantries. "The Whitmore Hotel downtown. A felony assault occurred in the main ballroom last night around 11:30 PM. The suspect’s family is currently trying to bribe or pressure the hotel administration to erase the local server logs and the cloud backup for that specific time frame."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, followed by the sound of sheets rustling and a heavy sigh. "The Whitmore? Man, that’s a high-profile account. If management requests a data purge due to a 'system glitch,' we usually just process it."
"Leo, listen to me," Maya said, her tone sharp as steel. "The victim is an eight-year-old girl. She’s in the hospital right now with a concussion because a grown man hit her with an oak board. The police have already filed a felony report. If your company processes a 'data purge' after a felony report has been filed, that’s not a routine glitch—that’s tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice. Your company will be dragged into a federal lawsuit, and your name will be on the digital log as the technician who executed the delete command."
Another silence stretched over the line, heavier this time. I held my breath, praying that Leo’s fear of the law would outweigh his loyalty to his corporate masters.
"Shit," Leo muttered. "Okay. Okay, look. I can’t give you the footage directly without a warrant. That would get me fired and sued. But what I can do is place a temporary legal hold flag on that entire data block. When a data block has an active internal dispute or safety hold flag, the system automatically locks it. No one—not the hotel manager, not the CEO, not even our top admin—can delete, overwrite, or alter a single frame until a legal representative signs off on it."
"How long will the hold last?" Maya asked.
"Twenty-four hours," Leo replied. "After that, the system requires a court order to maintain the lock."
"That’s all we need," Maya said, smiling at me. "Lock it down, Leo. Now."
"Done," Leo said, the sound of keyboard clacking audible over the phone. "The Whitmore ballroom feed from 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM is officially frozen in the secure vault. Tell your lawyer friend he has twenty-four hours to serve the paperwork, or the lock expires and management can do whatever they want with it."
May you like
As the call disconnected, I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since the night before. My father’s money and influence could buy a lot of things, but they couldn't outrun a digital lock placed by an honest technician.
We had secured the truth. Now, we just had to watch it.
