Chapter 8 - The Basement in Cicero
The rain was falling in relentless gray sheets by the time my Audi crossed into the industrial sprawl of Cicero. Warehouses and faded brick two-flats lined the streets, a world apart from the glittering limestone terraces of the Gold Coast. I parked across the street from a weathered brick duplex with peeling green paint on the window trim. Water poured from a disconnected downspout, splashing noisily into a mud puddle directly outside the basement entrance.
I grabbed my forensic case, pulled up the hood of my trench coat, and stepped out into the damp chill.
Walking down the cracked concrete steps to the subterranean entrance, I could hear the rhythmic clatter of an old washing machine vibrating inside. The door had no buzzer, only an oxidized brass knocker. I struck it three times, the sound sharp and authoritative.
It took nearly two minutes before the latch turned with a heavy metallic groan.
The door swung inward, revealing Daniel.
He was nearly unrecognizable from the polished, sharply dressed marketing consultant who used to critique the cut of my blazers. He wore a faded, oversized grey fleece, paint-splattered sweatpants, and worn slippers. His hair was thinning at the crown, unwashed and unruly, and the sharp jawline he had prided himself on was blurred by an unkempt beard. The faint smell of stale instant coffee and damp basement air drifted from behind him.
When his eyes focused on my face, he stumbled back half a step, clutching the frame of the doorway. "Claire?"
"Hello, Daniel," I said, stepping inside before he could formulate an excuse to close the door.
"What are you doing here?" His voice was raspy, laced with immediate panic. He darted his eyes past me toward the rain-slicked street, as if expecting federal marshals to emerge from the mist. "I’ve been following the terms. I’ve done my community service at the food pantry every Saturday. I haven’t contacted you. My probation officer said—"
"This isn't about your probation officer, Daniel," I cut in, setting my black forensic kit on an old laminate kitchen table.
The apartment was suffocatingly small. A single twin bed with a rumpled duvet sat in the corner, separated from a miniature kitchenette by a cheap folding screen. Cardboard moving boxes, half-unpacked and damp along their bottoms, lined the exposed cinderblock walls. On a metal desk in the corner sat a bulky, illuminated computer tower, its internal cooling fans humming like an old refrigerator.
Daniel rubbed his forehead, his fingers shaking slightly. "Then why are you here? To look at how I live now? To make sure I’m miserable enough?"
"I don't care how you live, Daniel. I care that Olivia Grant filed an emergency civil countersuit from federal prison three days ago," I stated coldly, meeting his terrified gaze. "She named you as a co-conspirator in an industrial espionage scheme targeting Crestview’s acquisition data. She claims you deliberately stole proprietary valuation files from my personal drives and fed them to her."
The color vanished from Daniel’s face. He sank onto the edge of a sagging sofa, his knees practically buckling. "What? No... no! That’s a lie! I never stole anything from your laptop! I swear to God, Claire, I never opened your work folders! She told me she just needed general industry insights—she said we were going to build our own agency!"
"Then explain to me why Apex Vanguard, the hedge consortium backing her shell company, just subpoenaed every single digital archive associated with our marriage," I said, walking toward the metal desk where the old computer sat.
"I don't know who Apex Vanguard even is!" Daniel stammered, scrambling to his feet and trailing behind me like an anxious child. "Olivia brought over an external hard drive one night when you were in New York for an audit. She said it had marketing templates. She asked to plug it into my desktop to transfer some files. That was all! I swear, Claire, I didn't touch your files!"
I paused, turning around to face him. "She brought an external drive into our home while I was out of state?"
"Yes! Just once! It was two months before... before the hotel," he said, tears of absolute panic welling in his bloodshot eyes. "She said she forgot her charger and needed to pull a slide deck. She used my machine for maybe ten minutes."
I looked down at the humming desktop tower. Olivia hadn't used Daniel to steal my files. She had used Daniel’s unsecured desktop, connected directly to our high-speed home network, to deploy an internal packet sniffer into our domestic IP address. From there, she had cloned my corporate traffic while I was logging into my firm’s secure VPN.
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Daniel hadn't been an active spy. He had been an open digital door.
"Turn on the machine, Daniel," I commanded, opening my forensic kit and unscrewing the side panel of the tower with practiced efficiency. "Right now."
