The message ended. Silence hung in the air, thick enough to taste.
I rewound it and played it again. And again. Each time, I tried to pick apart the edges—listen for the tells in the voice, the half-swallowed vowels, the static at the end that felt almost intentional. I scrubbed back and forth over the word "limp," because whoever called in, their voice caught on that word like it meant something personal.
A limp. I didn't know anyone in town with a limp, not one that stood out. But maybe that was the point.
The host returned, this time with a hint of triumph. “For those following along, we’ve posted a transcript of the voicemail on our website. If you have any information, you know where to find us.”
I slammed the laptop shut. The sound echoed through the empty house like a gunshot.
For a minute, I just sat there, letting the silence fill in around me. I could hear the wind outside, the way it rattled the gutters and made the old wood siding creak. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath, but every time I exhaled, the taste of cheap coffee and sour adrenaline clung to the back of my throat.
The problem with rumors is, they never die on their own. You have to kill them. Dig them up at the root and torch the whole patch of dirt, or else they come back meaner.
I stood and started pacing the living room, stepping over loose extension cords and piles of sawdust. My hands shook—not from fear, but from anger. Old, hot, familiar. The same kind I used to get whenever my dad decided a problem could be solved with a belt or a boot or a knuckle to the side of the head.
I grabbed the mug off the table and hurled it against the far wall. It shattered, leaving a splatter of brown liquid and a spray of ceramic teeth. I didn’t care. I’d fix the wall later. I’d clean up the mess.
I looked at the dark reflection in the window. I barely recognized myself. The haircut was too clean, the shirt too expensive, the body language all wrong. But the eyes—they were still the same. Still hungry for something I couldn’t name.
I walked back to the laptop and opened it again. I scrubbed through the podcast, found the tipster’s voicemail, and played it at half speed. I tried to pick apart the background noise—the subtle echo, the faint hum of a refrigerator, the quick, panicked breath at the end. Every detail was a potential clue. Every detail mattered.
If the cops weren’t going to do anything, that was fine by me. I had resources they couldn’t dream of. And I was done waiting for someone else to clear my name.
If I wanted peace, I’d have to earn it myself.
A few hours later, the spare bedroom looked more like a NASA command center than any guest room you’d ever seen. The walls were bare, the carpet still held the ghost of the old owners’ treadmill, and the only furniture was a folding table lined with a Frankenstein’s monster of computer guts and off-the-shelf monitors. I didn’t miss my old job, but I’d forever love my gear.
I logged in under one of my dozen dummy accounts and spun up the VPN. Two clicks later, I was “remote-desktopping” into a server cluster in Malaysia, which bounced me to an AWS bucket in Denver, which then ghosted back into Whittier’s municipal system through a backdoor I’d left during a bored afternoon in September. The only security on the Whittier Falls PD was a single password that hadn’t changed in three years (“GoBobcats!”), so the only real obstacle was keeping myself from vomiting at the sight of Windows XP in 2025.
I grinned despite myself. It was almost too easy.
I’d spent most of my life waiting for the world to pull a fast one on me. Now, it felt good to be two steps ahead.
I went straight for the police case files—at first, the folder tree looked empty, but then I spotted the archives: “Higgins, T.” Inside were a series of PDFs and scanned handwritten reports. I set them to download in the background while I started scanning through the first document.
The initial report was a standard death-by-misadventure writeup. Deputy Miller’s name was all over it. I skimmed past the basic stuff—the time, the temperature, the coroner’s best guess at cause of death. Then I hit the first anomaly: the witness statements were all logged on the same day, within minutes of each other, but the time stamps didn’t line up with the timelinein the summary. Miller’s log said he’d conducted the interviews himself, but the handwriting on half the scanned sheets didn’t match his signature.
I pulled up a notepad and started pasting in lines that didn’t add up.
Next up, the autopsy. It was three pages long, but the middle page was missing. Page 1 and 3, but no 2. The scan just jumped right over it, like someone had never bothered to double-check. I flagged it, then moved on.
The more I read, the more pissed off I got. Every report had tiny discrepancies: font changes, date formats that didn’t match, lines that looked like they’d been pasted in from other cases. Most people would never notice, but I’d spent a decade parsing logs for fraud and software exploits. Once you see one, you start seeing them everywhere.
The real gut-punch came when I hit the final case summary. It was short—barely a paragraph—and signed by Deputy Miller.
Except, the signature was off. It was too perfect, almost traced. And the body of the summary didn’t match anything about his report from previous pages. It was all nonsense.
I checked the file metadata. Last edited by “admin.” My fingers flitted over the keys and a moment later, I’d found out that Miller was placed on administrative leave with full pay six days after Ty died.
My hands went cold. I scrolled up and down, double-checking every entry, every log-in, every edit time. With each click, it got worse.
It felt like peeling the skin off a fruit and finding it rotten all the way through. The entire case was forged, faked, erased and stuffed with new documents in the hope that no one looked too close.
And then it hit me. My blood ran cold as I saw the witness statements. Waylon Brooks. My father was there that night. I knew he was, but there was official record of it right here.
I pulled up the rest of the evidence logs. According to the inventory, Ty’s phone, wallet, and a set of keys were all “lost during recovery.” Lost. I could’ve thrown the laptop out the window.
I screenshotted everything—every weirdly formatted line, every time stamp, every altered PDF. I made a spreadsheet tracking every edit, every username, every login time. The pattern was obvious: a coordinated effort to make me look like I was at the center of everything.
