Chapter 6 - The Copper Trail
By Tuesday afternoon, the digital forensics lab on Wilshire Boulevard had completed its extraction from the copper phone.
The specialist, a reclusive man named Aris who worked in a windowless room surrounded by humming servers and blue diagnostic monitors, handed Evelyn and me three bound copies of the *Digital Forensic Extraction Report*.
“The device wasn't just a burner,” Aris said, adjusting his glasses. “It was Jackson’s primary command-and-control device for his offshore accounts. He used it specifically to bypass the two-factor authentication tied to the family’s domestic devices. And he was sloppy.”
“How sloppy?” Evelyn asked, flipping through the first fifty pages of metadata logs.
“He kept voice memos,” Aris said with a grim smile. “Every time he met with his mother or his bookkeeper, he recorded the conversations on the device’s internal memo app. He thought he was protecting himself against Genesis in case she tried to cut him out of the proceeds.”
Aris clicked a key on his workstation.
A speaker on the wall crackled, and then Genesis’s voice filled the room, crystalline and horrifyingly clear:
*“...Arthur is completely senile now, Jackson. He won’t notice the missing quarterly distributions from his pension trust. But we have to plug the hole in the Macau accounts before the gaming commission flags the transfer to the domestic clearinghouse. Claire’s firm has three million in bonding capacity. If she takes the liability for the Meridian foundations, we can draw the first tranche of the construction loan and wire it directly to the clearing account in Nevis. She won't know until the foundation settles, and by then, the firm will be under receivership and the debt will be extinguished in corporate bankruptcy.”*
Then came Jackson’s voice, lazy, casual, slurred with bourbon:
*“What if she asks to see the engineering disclosures?”*
Genesis let out that tiny, melodic laugh that had chilled my blood for three years.
*“She won't ask. Claire is desperate to believe you’re a success, Jackson. She spends her whole life managing architects and contractors because she needs to control everything. The easiest way to blind a woman who needs control is to make her think she’s saving you. She’ll sign whatever you put in front of her as long as you look her in the eye and tell her she’s your savior.”*
I sat in the swivel chair, my fingers digging into the foam armrests until the plastic cracked beneath my grip.
They had studied me.
They had taken every insecurity I had brought into the marriage—the loneliness of being an orphan who had worked her way through MIT on scholarships, the exhaustion of carrying a fifteen-person firm on my shoulders, the pathetic, childish wish to be loved by a family that seemed so solid, so ancient, so rooted—and they had drafted a blueprint from it to dismantle me brick by brick.
“There’s more,” Aris said quietly.
He clicked another file.
This recording was dated only three weeks ago.
*Jackson:* *“She’s starting to ask questions about the St. Paul taxes. The Ramsey County assessor sent the valuation notice to her personal email instead of the PO Box.”*
*Genesis:* *“Then we accelerate the schedule. I spoke to Mercer. If she becomes difficult during the divorce, we don’t just take the property. We file an ex-parte petition for a mental health conservatorship.”*
The room seemed to drop twenty degrees.
*Jackson:* *“A conservatorship? She’s not crazy, mother. She’s sharper than Mercer.”*
*Genesis:* *“She had an uncle who died in a psychiatric facility in Duluth, didn't she? We have the family history. A few altered emails, a prescription for lithium planted in her medicine cabinet, a series of bizarre communications sent from her corporate account to the city council... Mercer knows the evaluating psychologist. Two weeks in a private facility in Malibu, and you are appointed the temporary conservator of her person and estate. She won't have the legal standing to sign a lease, let alone defend her firm in court.”*
The audio file ended.
A low, electrical hum from the server racks filled the silence.
Evelyn was no longer reading. She was staring at the speaker on the wall, her patrician face pale with cold, murderous rage. She had spent thirty years handling the most vicious divorces in Los Angeles, but this was something else. This was not a divorce.
This was a calculated, corporate-style assassination of a human being’s identity.
“Aris,” Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a register so quiet it was terrifying. “Did you verify the cryptographic integrity of these files?”
“SHA-256 hashes generated and verified against the device’s physical NAND memory,” Aris said. “They are immutable. They will survive any federal Daubert challenge in any court in the country.”
Evelyn stood up, picked up her briefcase, and snapped the locks shut.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
May you like
“We are not going to family court, Claire,” Evelyn said, looking at me with eyes like polished flint. “We are walking these files across the street to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. This isn't community property anymore. This is a multi-jurisdictional RICO enterprise.”
***
