THEY ATTACKED ME WHILE I HELD MY NEWBORN—BUT MY SOS WATCH EXPOSED THE DAUGHTER THEY SAID WAS DEAD

Detective Ortiz walked into the Open Door Project the next morning carrying two cups of black coffee and a manila folder thick with surveillance photos. She wore her badge on her belt and a scowl that indicated she had been awake for over twenty-four hours.

She handed one cup to Mara and dropped the folder onto the desk. "Your girl Elena is good, I’ll give her that. She managed to get these photos without tripping the thermal sensors Vance has set up around the Red Hook property."

Mara opened the folder. The photos showed a dilapidated brick building near the water. It looked abandoned from the outside, but the infrared shots revealed massive heat signatures coming from the basement level.

"Servers," Mara said.

"Massive ones," Ortiz confirmed, taking a sip of her coffee. "I ran the plates on the vehicles parked in the alley. They belong to a private security firm registered to Arthur Vance. He’s definitely guarding something down there."

"Can you get a warrant?"

Ortiz sighed, dragging a hand through her hair. "On what grounds? A high heat signature and some private security? Vance has three judges in his pocket who would throw my warrant request straight into the shredder and alert him that we're looking. If we want to raid that building, we need probable cause that ties directly to a specific, ongoing crime."

"Sarah's son," Mara said firmly. "He was taken under false medical pretenses. We have the mother’s testimony."

"Testimony isn't enough to breach a fortified data center," Ortiz warned. "Vance's lawyers will argue it's a civil family court matter. We need digital evidence that proves Vance Medical deliberately falsified the boy's charts to trigger the custody order."

"If we can't get a warrant to go in, we have to force Vance to make a mistake," Mara said, her mind racing. "We have to make him panic and move the data. If he transfers the files across state lines, it becomes a federal wire fraud issue."