Chapter 4 - The Bodycam Loophole
I waited in the stifling, pitch-black attic for twenty agonizing minutes until Ryder tore out of the driveway, his tires screeching violently against the asphalt. The moment his taillights disappeared around the corner, I climbed down from the ceiling, covered in dust and sweat, my mind racing with a singular, desperate objective.
I couldn't go to the local police department. Captain Grant owned the precinct, from the dispatchers to the desk sergeants. Going to the county sheriff was equally risky; Grant played golf with the county commissioners every weekend. I needed someone outside their sphere of influence, someone with the technical expertise and legal muscle to bypass the municipal corruption completely.
I drove out of the neighborhood with my headlights completely turned off until I reached the county highway. Twenty miles outside of town lived Frank Vance, my older brother. Frank was a retired state police investigator who had been forced out five years earlier when he refused to bury a zoning bribery scandal involving Captain Grant’s inner circle. Frank had spent the last half-decade running an independent digital forensics firm from a converted barn on forty acres of secluded farmland.
When I pounded on Frank’s back door at three in the morning, he answered with a 12-gauge shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. One look at my face and the blood on my knuckles, and he stepped aside, racking the bolt backward to clear the chamber.
""It's Mason,"" I said, my voice cracking for the first time that night. ""Ryder broke both his legs in an underpass. And Victoria helped arrange it.""
Frank didn't ask foolish questions. He shut the heavy timber door, bolted three separate locks, and led me straight into his basement laboratory, where four massive computer monitors glowed against concrete walls. I emptied my pockets onto the steel workbench: the two hard drives, the brass USB key, and Victoria's handwritten note to Grant.
Frank slipped on latex gloves, plugged the brass drive into an air-gapped terminal, and began scanning through the code. Within minutes, his eyes narrowed behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
""Ethan, this isn't just financial records,"" Frank muttered, his fingers clattering across a mechanical keyboard like rapid gunfire. ""Ryder was wearing an Axon Body 3 camera during the assault on Mason. Local departments use cloud servers managed by Grant's private IT contractor to store and review footage. But Victoria’s company built the server architecture for the precinct’s cloud storage.""
""Meaning what?"" I asked, leaning over his shoulder.
""Meaning Victoria kept a continuous, automated administrative mirror backup of all police cloud data on her private server as insurance against Grant,"" Frank said, a grim smile touching his lips. ""She didn't trust Grant any more than he trusted her. She was hoarding the raw, unedited bodycam feeds so Grant could never double-cross her on the riverfront development deal.""
Frank entered an administrative bypass script. A progress bar flashed across the center screen, ticking up from zero to one hundred percent. The screen went black for a second, and then a video player window expanded across the entire display.
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The file timestamp read: 11:42 PM - Last Night.
The camera angle was from the center of Sergeant Cole Ryder's tactical vest. The video was razor-sharp, captured in night-vision high definition. The audio kicked in with a sharp hiss of rain, followed immediately by the terrifying sound of my nineteen-year-old son screaming in absolute agony.
