Chapter 9 - The Neighbor’s Eye
The iron gate clicked open with a heavy mechanical groan. David jogged up the gravel driveway toward the modest, modern house. Marcus Reed stood in the doorway, dressed in a flannel shirt and faded jeans, holding a steaming mug of black coffee. His graying beard and sharp, skeptical eyes took in David’s disheveled state and blood-stained cuffs.
""I heard the sirens earlier,"" Marcus said bluntly, stepping aside to let David enter. ""Figured your toxic family finally boiled over.""
""Elena pushed Clara down the foyer stairs onto the hardwood,"" David said, breathless as he stepped into Marcus’s living room. The room was dominated by a wall of computer monitors displaying live high-definition camera feeds of the surrounding street. ""Someone broke into my house and stole the internal drive. The police have nothing. Did your front cameras catch our driveway?""
Marcus set his mug down on a wooden desk and sat in his swivel chair, cracking his knuckles. ""Your mother sued me twice to take down these cameras. Said they violated her precious sense of elite privacy. I told her to rot.""
He began typing rapidly, pulling up archived footage from earlier that afternoon. A grid of high-resolution video windows populated the center screen, timestamped with pinpoint precision. Marcus scrubbed backward to 2:10 PM.
On the screen, Elena’s silver sports car pulled into David’s driveway. She stepped out, her expression furious, slamming the car door before storming toward the front entrance.
""Look closer, Marcus,"" David said, pointing at the large bay window that looked directly into their open-concept foyer. ""The blinds were open.""
Marcus enhanced the feed, zooming in on the living room window. Because of Marcus’s ultra-high-definition optical lenses, the interior of the Vance house was clearly visible through the glass. The video showed Clara walking into the foyer carrying a glass of water. Elena stormed inside, screaming, her face contorted in rage. Clara tried to turn away, putting her hands up to de-escalate. Then, with horrifying clarity, Elena stepped forward, grabbed Clara by the shoulders, and hurled her violently backward. Clara’s head cracked against the corner of the wooden credenza before she collapsed limp onto the floor.
""Jesus Christ,"" Marcus muttered, his cynicism evaporating instantly. ""That's cold-blooded.""
""Can you copy this to a flash drive right now?"" David demanded, his voice shaking with righteous fury.
""I can do better,"" Marcus said, clicking his mouse. ""I can upload it directly to a secure, off-site cloud server. But look at what happens five minutes later.""
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Marcus forwarded the video to 2:20 PM. While David was kneeling beside Clara on the phone, a nondescript black sedan pulled up across the curb. A man in a dark hoodie slipped around the back of David’s house, emerging two minutes later carrying the hard drive unit. The man got into the sedan, but as the car turned under Marcus’s camera, the high-beam headlights illuminated the driver's face.
It was Evelyn Vance’s personal chauffeur.
