Chapter 14 - THE TRAITOR WITH A BADGE
Only twelve people knew where the ledger was stored.
Detective Ruiz was one of them.
Federal Special Agent Nolan Pierce led the internal review.
He collected phones, access cards, and vehicle records.
No one was allowed to leave.
Julia had memorized large portions of the ledger.
But memory was not enough for court.
Photographs existed.
Digital copies existed.
Still, defense attorneys would argue they had been altered.
The original book connected handwriting, ink, dates, and fingerprints.
Without it, the most powerful suspects could escape.
I returned to my condo under federal protection.
The rooms felt unfamiliar.
Every drawer reminded me that someone had searched my life.
Every sound from the hallway made my body tense.
I stood in the kitchen and stared at the faint stain on my cuff.
Adrian’s violence had lasted seconds.
Its echo lived everywhere.
Maya and the children stayed in a protected apartment nearby.
Nicole entered witness protection.
Julia refused to disappear.
“I hid once,” she told the agents.
“My husband died anyway.”
Her brother Samuel remained beside her.
Together, they rebuilt the encrypted files from backups she had hidden across several servers.
At midnight, Detective Ruiz called.
They had identified the traitor.
Agent Nolan Pierce had accessed the evidence vault seven minutes before the power failure.
His vehicle left the building through an underground garage.
Pierce had also supervised the operation at Warehouse 8.
He had known where I would enter.
He had known about the evacuation.
He could have warned Adrian.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Missing.”
Pierce’s apartment had been emptied.
His bank account contained a recent deposit of three million dollars.
The money came from a company controlled by the Meridian Consortium.
Then I remembered something from the warehouse.
The explosion happened immediately after the drone appeared.
Adrian had released the switch.
But the collapse spread too quickly.
There may have been a second detonator.
Pierce could have triggered it.
He had not intended to arrest Adrian.
He had intended to bury both of us.
Detective Ruiz sent me a photograph of Pierce.
I recognized him from the Caldwell estate.
He had stood near the front hallway while officers searched the basement.
At one point, he carried a box upstairs.
He could have taken the ledger that night.
But Daniel called Maya afterward asking her to find it.
That meant Pierce did not steal it then.
Someone else had hidden it before evidence collection.
Julia had taken it to the burned building.
Pierce waited until she unlocked the accounts.
Then he moved.
My doorbell rang at twelve forty-eight.
Federal guards checked the hallway.
No one stood outside.
A small package rested on the floor.
The bomb squad cleared it.
Inside was the blue ledger.
A note lay beneath it.
PIERCE IS NOT THE TRAITOR.
HE IS THE DELIVERY MAN.
The handwriting belonged to Adrian.
May you like
Another line appeared on the back.
ASK RUIZ WHO PAID FOR HER HOUSE.
