I raised my glass and thanked my grandfather for the two hundred dollars. He stopped carving the turkey and looked up, his eyes piercing. He asked what I meant by « two hundred dollars, » then told everyone at the table that the gift he’d given me was actually five hundred thousand dollars. In the silence that followed, I realized that someone had stolen a fortune, completely unaware that my real job was to track down people who leave digital footprints.
My name is Layla Alexander. I’m thirty-two years old and I live my life within a series of encrypted tunnels and digital backdoors at Helixgate Analytics in Denver. My job title is Senior Cybersecurity Analyst, but in practice, I’m a professional anomaly hunter. I’m looking for a single line of code that breaks a pattern, a fraction of a cent smuggled into a foreign shell, or a ghost login at 3 a.m. suggesting an employee is selling their company. I trust data because numbers have no ulterior motives. They don’t lie to protect your feelings, and they certainly don’t smile at you as they pick your pockets.
Returning to Redwood Falls always felt like stepping out of a high-bandwidth server room and into a sepia photograph. The city hadn’t changed. The air was thinner, cooler, and smelled of pine needles and wood smoke. The King estate, my grandfather’s home, sat on a ridge overlooking the valley—a sprawling Victorian manor that looked exactly as it had when I was a child. It was a house built of old money and older values, or at least that was the facade we polished every November. This Thanksgiving was supposed to be a truce. I’d spent the last week in Denver, immersed in a forensic audit of a mid-sized bank that had lost control of a significant portion of its capital, and my eyes were tired from staring at glowing monitors. I wanted wine. I wanted turkey. I wanted forty-eight hours to pretend I was just a granddaughter, not a woman who knew how to ruin lives with a keyboard.
The house was warm when I arrived. The heavy oak front door swung open, and the scent of toasted rosemary and cinnamon filled the air. The dim, golden lighting cast long, soothing shadows across the mahogany paneling. It was an atmosphere that demanded a lowered voice and a relaxed shoulder. My grandfather, Walter King, commanded from the living room. At seventy-eight, he was still the man who had built a local real estate empire out of a single hardware store. He sat in a leather wing chair, a glass of Scotch in one hand, looking less like an old man and more like a retired general reviewing his troops. He had always been the moral compass of the family, the one person whose approval I truly sought. A genuine smile broke out on his face at the sight of me, the kind that made the wrinkles around his eyes deepen in a way I loved.
Then there was the rest of the cast. My father, Daniel Rhodes, stood by the fireplace. He was a quiet man, an accountant who had spent thirty years keeping books, which had never made him rich. He held his wine glass with a tension that suggested he was afraid someone would take it away from him. My mother, Rebecca King Rhodes, moved between the kitchen and the living room, moving erratically and birdlike. She was a retired elementary school teacher who treated every family gathering like a performance review. And finally, Hannah, my younger sister. Hannah was sprawled on the velvet couch, holding her phone at a perfect forty-five-degree angle so the light fell on her. She was twenty-six years old and had listed her job title on social media as « Lifestyle Curator. » To me, she was simply unemployed and had a trust fund mentality. She waved at me without looking up from the screen, letting her followers know she was experiencing the quintessential authentic family vacation.
The tension began in the kitchen two hours before dinner. I went to help with the cranberry sauce. Mom was wiping down the counter, which was already spotless. When she saw me, she stopped and reached into her apron pocket. She pulled out a cream-colored envelope and pressed it into my hand. Her fingers were cold. She said Grandpa wanted me to have this. She lowered her voice to a whisper, glancing toward the hallway to make sure we were alone. She said the estate had been slow this year and that cash flow was a bit tight, but Grandpa wanted to give me something.
Inside the envelope was a check written in my mother’s hand, signed with a trembling signature similar to my grandfather’s. The amount was two hundred dollars. My mother squeezed my hand. She asked me not to mention the amount to him. She said he was sensitive about not being able to do more this year and didn’t want him to feel embarrassed in front of Daniel and Hannah. She asked me to just say thank you and leave it. I looked at the check. Two hundred dollars. It was a symbolic gesture, basically for gas, but I felt a surge of sympathy for the old man. He was proud, and when the going got tough, the fact that he was thinking of me made all the difference. I put the check in my jacket pocket and promised my mother I’d handle it discreetly. I told her I wouldn’t cause any trouble. I had no idea I was walking into a trap.
Dinner was served in the formal dining room. The long table was set with fine china, the plates rimmed with gold that had lasted three generations. The turkey sat in the center, golden brown and steaming. My grandfather took his seat at the head of the table, carving knife in hand. He looked powerful, full of energy. He didn’t look like a man struggling to scrape together a holiday bonus. The conversation began with a simple, innocent murmur. Hannah talked about her engagement numbers and a potential partnership with a vitamin water company that I was almost certain was a Ponzi scheme. My father nodded, asking questions about tax deductions, which Hannah clearly didn’t understand. My mother kept piling stuffing onto everyone’s plates, laughing a little too loudly at jokes that weren’t particularly funny.
I sat quietly, observing. It was a professional habit. I observed the micro-expressions on their faces. I watched my father sip his drinks whenever the conversation turned to money. I watched my mother glance at the grandfather clock every now and then, as if trying to outlive a game I didn’t know we were playing.
Walter cleared his throat. Silence fell at the table. He put down his carving knife and looked directly at me. His eyes were sharp, penetrating, and full of pride. He asked me in a loud, sociable tone what it was like to finally have real capital to work with. He said he knew I’d been renting this apartment in Denver for years and hoped it would give me the freedom to finally buy my own place, or perhaps invest in my own consulting firm. The room seemed to tilt slightly to the left. I stopped, my fork dangling halfway to my mouth. For a split second, I assumed he was losing his mind. He’d been talking about buying a house for two hundred dollars. My mother had warned me he was sensitive, that the situation was difficult. I decided to pretend, to be a good granddaughter, protecting his dignity.
I smiled, bright and exuberant. I lifted my glass slightly and said clearly, so everyone could hear, that I was grateful. I said, « Grandpa, thank you again for the two hundred dollars. I really appreciate it. »
The reaction was immediate, though I didn’t yet understand it. My mother dropped her salad fork. It clattered against the porcelain with a sound like a gunshot. Hannah stopped chewing. My father closed his eyes for a second, as if bracing for impact. Walter froze. The smile vanished from his face, replaced by a look of genuine confusion, which then hardened into something steely and menacing. He leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the table. He asked me to repeat myself. He asked, « What, two hundred dollars? »
I hesitated, my smile fading. I glanced at my mother, but she was staring intently into her glass of water. I tried to keep up appearances. I told him everything was fine, that the bill was generous, and that he didn’t need to worry. Walter interrupted me. His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried a weight that drowned out the hum of the air conditioning. He spoke slowly, accentuating each syllable.
He said, « I gave you a gift of five hundred thousand dollars. »
The silence that fell was absolute. It was palpable. It pricked my eardrums. The number hung in the air above the center of the table. Huge and unbelievable. Five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million. I looked at my grandfather. He wasn’t decrepit. He wasn’t confused. He was angry. I looked at the check in my pocket, burning a hole in the fabric. Two hundred dollars. Then I looked at the rest of the table. The atmosphere changed from the warm, festive glow to the cold, sterile light of the interrogation room. I saw them not as family, but as people under investigation.
I saw Hannah. Her face turned white. Her hand was shaking so badly she had to put down her wine glass to avoid spilling it. She looked terrified. I saw Daniel, my father. He was gripping the stem of his glass so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He was staring at a spot on the wall behind Walter’s head, not wanting to look at me, not wanting to look at his father-in-law. I saw Rebecca, my mother. She let out a breathless, ragged laugh that sounded like shattering glass. She waved her hand dismissively. She told my grandfather that he must be remembering wrong. That he was confusing it with something else. She tried to steer the conversation toward the turkey, the weather, something else, but I was no longer listening.
My mind, trained to spot patterns in chaotic streams of data, was already racing. It was piecing together pieces I’d been ignoring for days. Obscure phone calls, insistence that I didn’t have to come home this year, a check handed to me in secret, a warning not to discuss money. I realized my breath had been taken away. I looked at the faces of people I shared blood with and saw the same look I’d seen on the faces of the corporate fraudsters just before the auditor walked in. Guilt, panic, and a desperate, silent hope that I was too stupid to do the math.
I spent an entire week chasing a ghost on a bank server, searching for a missing sum of money that had vanished into the ether. I traced IP addresses and analyzed login timestamps. I treated it like an abstract puzzle, a game of cat and mouse with a nameless thief. But sitting there, the sour smell of roast turkey in my stomach, I realized I’d made a fundamental error in judgment. That night, under the crystal chandelier in King’s mansion, I realized the biggest case of my career wasn’t on a secure server in Denver. It was right there, across from me, serving gravy boats. The anomaly was in this room. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just an investigator. I was the crime scene.
Seven days before the dinner that would end my family as I knew it, I sat in my office at Helixgate Analytics. The room was dark, lit only by the cool blue glow of three monitors. It was 9:00 PM on a Tuesday, and the entire building was silent. I preferred it that way. The hum of the fans was white noise, a barrier between me and the chaotic, confusing world outside. I was in the middle of a forensic investigation for a Chicago healthcare facility. They had fallen victim to a ransomware attack, a sophisticated attack that had managed to bypass firewalls by disguising itself as a routine system update. My job was to pinpoint the entry point and find the digital fingerprint left behind by the hackers.
I lived for this particular kind of focus. It was a flow state, where the world was reduced to lines of code, timestamps, and IP addresses. There was no ambiguity in the data. Logins were either authorized or not. A file was corrupted or clean. My phone vibrated, hitting the mahogany desk, shattering the silence. The vibration made a sharp, rattling sound that made me jump. I glanced at the screen. The flashing name was Hannah.
I stared at her for a long moment. My sister hadn’t called me. We existed in separate universes. I lived in a world of logic and encryption; Hannah lived in a world of filters, perspectives, and engagement metrics. Her communication with me was usually limited to obligatory birthday texts, usually sent the day after, or group emails about holiday logistics, where I was merely the recipient of a carbon copy. A voice call at nine in the evening was an anomaly. In my job, anomalies were warning signs. I picked up the phone, swiped the green icon. I answered with a simple « hello. »
Hannah’s voice dripped from the speaker, syrupy and breathless. It was a tone I recognized from her Instagram stories—the one she used when apologizing to followers for not posting for 24 hours, or explaining why a sponsored skincare product gave her a rash but was still totally worth the purchase. She said, « Layla, hey. Oh my god, I’m so glad I caught you. I know you’re probably super busy saving the internet or whatever you’re doing. »
I leaned back in my chair, rubbing the bridge of my nose. I asked her what was going on. She sighed, a long, dramatic exhale that sounded practiced. She said she was calling with bad news. She said she wanted to warn me before I booked anything non-refundable. She told me Grandpa was unwell. My stomach tightened. An image of Walter King, broad-shouldered and invincible, flashed through my mind. I asked her what she meant. Hannah lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. She said he’d been incredibly weak lately. She said he was tired all the time, forgetting things, just slowing down. She told me Mom and Dad were worried that the stress of organizing a big Thanksgiving dinner would be too much for him this year. She said they were considering canceling the whole event, keeping it small, for only immediate family in town.
I frowned, staring at the dark computer screen. “Only immediate family in town.” The wording was specific. It drew a circle that included her, my parents, and Chase, but excluded me. She continued, her voice dripping with mock sympathy. She said she knew how busy I was with my big projects in Denver. She said she felt terrible thinking about me flying out there, spending all that money on plane tickets, and taking a vacation, only to find Grandpa asleep in his chair the entire time. She said, “Maybe it would be better if I stayed in Denver this year, for my own good.”
“Really?” I remained silent, letting her words hang in the air. Something was wrong. The pattern didn’t match. Three days ago, I’d been on FaceTime with Walter. He was in the garage in his old flannel shirt, complaining about the price of cedar. He was standing on a six-foot ladder, changing a light bulb in a spotlight because he didn’t want to pay a handyman for something he could do himself. He looked radiant. He looked strong. He was teasing me about my new haircut and asking if I was eating enough. This man didn’t fit the frail, disoriented invalid Hannah was now painting for me.
And then came the concern about my money. Hannah never talked about money unless she asked for it or bragged about spending it. The idea that she was worried about the cost of my plane ticket was as likely as a phishing email asking for my password to verify security. It was a social engineering tactic. It was an emotional appeal designed to bypass critical thinking. I told her I appreciated the update. I tried to keep my tone neutral and dispassionate. I told her I’d look at my schedule and let her know. She sounded relieved, almost overly enthusiastic. She said it sounded great and that I should just be careful. She quickly hung up.
I set the phone down on my desk. The silence of the office had returned, but the white noise of the fans no longer soothed me. I felt a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, the same feeling I’d had when I’d discovered a backdoor in the client server. Someone was trying to manipulate the access logs. Someone was trying to revoke my access to the family home. I didn’t hesitate. I picked up the phone again and dialed my grandfather’s landline. He answered on the second ring. His voice was loud, clear, and completely devoid of fragility. He shouted my name. He sounded like he was in a good mood. I could hear noise in the background, the distinct sound of a door opening, and the murmur of voices. I asked him how he was doing.
He laughed. He told me he was fantastic. He said he was at the liquor store on Main Street right now. He said he was looking at a case of Cabernet that cost more than his first car, but he was going to buy it anyway. He said this year’s Thanksgiving would be the biggest in a decade. He said he wanted everything to be perfect when I got home. I closed my eyes. The discrepancy between Hannah’s story and Walter’s reality wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a fabrication. I spoke carefully. I told him I’d heard he felt a little sick. I said I was worried he might be exaggerating. Walter snorted. He asked who had told me that. He said that if someone told me he was weak, it was showing their own lack of character. He joked that he could still surpass my father and surpass Hannah’s new boyfriend without breaking a sweat. He told me to stop worrying and just make sure I was hungry when I got there. We said goodbye, and I ended the call.
I sat in the dark, still clutching my phone. The cold metal felt like a weapon. Grandpa was fine. He was planning a feast. He was expecting me. And yet, my sister had just spent ten minutes trying to convince me he was at the end of his rope. She tried to convince me to stay away, and she blamed my parents as the source of this anxiety. Why? Why would my family want to exclude me from a holiday we’d celebrated together every year my entire life? Why use Grandpa’s health as a tool of pressure? It was cruel. It was unnecessary. Unless my presence posed a threat.
I turned back to the monitors. Lines of code from the Chicago hospital hack were blurring together. I couldn’t focus. The logical part of my brain, the part that professionally solved puzzles, was practically screaming. You don’t lock a user out of a system unless you’re trying to hide unauthorized activity. You don’t quarantine a file unless it contains evidence you don’t want seen. My thoughts began to drift. I thought about the dynamics of the past few months, about the confusing emails from my father, about how my mother changed the subject every time I asked about maintaining her estate. About how Hannah had suddenly switched her wardrobe from fast fashion to designer clothes, which I knew she couldn’t afford on her influencer income. I thought about money. Money had always been the foundation of the King family. My grandfather had it. My parents managed it. Hannah wanted it. I built my career around ensuring I never had to ask for it.
The memory came back, sharp and clear. When I was eighteen, just before I left for college, Walter took me to the bank. He opened a joint checking account with me. He deposited ten thousand dollars into it. He said it was for emergencies. He said if I ever got stuck, if I needed a ticket home, a security deposit, or a safe place to sleep, the money would be there. He said he wanted his name on the account so he could transfer the funds immediately if I had trouble. I’d used it sparingly in college, buying books and putting a down payment on my first apartment after I graduated and started my own business. I stopped using it. I hadn’t logged into that account in years. I’d assumed it lay dormant there, collecting dust and a few cents in interest, a relic of a time when I needed a safety net. But tonight, the anomaly in my sister’s voice made me question every assumption I’d made.
I opened a new tab in my browser. The incognito window was a reflex. I typed in the Frontier Trust Bank URL. The homepage loaded in light blue. I stared at the login fields. I had to review three different versions of my old passwords before I found the right combination. I had to answer security questions that seemed to belong to a stranger. What was the name of your first pet? Buster. What was your mother’s maiden name? King. The screen refreshed. The loading circle spun for three seconds. Those three seconds seemed longer than the entire week I’d spent in Denver. If Hannah was lying about her grandfather’s health, what else were they lying about? Why did they need me to stay in Denver? What was happening at that table that couldn’t withstand my scrutiny? I decided then and there that I wouldn’t trust their words. Words can be refined. Tone can be faked. Tears can be fabricated. I will trust the one thing that has never betrayed me. I will trust data.
The bank account dashboard flashed on the screen. My gaze immediately went to the balance. I expected to see a few thousand, maybe less if bank fees had devoured it for a decade. I blinked. I moved closer to the monitor, the blue light reflecting in my pupils. The balance wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t a dormant account. It was active. I clicked the transaction history tab. The list was filling up. Line after line of data, dates, vendors, transfers, withdrawals. My heart began to pound in my chest, a slow, heavy rhythm of terror. I was staring at a crime scene. I was staring at a digital autopsy of my family’s integrity. Scrolling down, tracing the movements of numbers that shouldn’t exist, I realized Hannah’s call wasn’t a friendly suggestion. It was a desperate attempt to distract the victim from the evidence. I wasn’t just a granddaughter anymore. I was an auditor, and the audit had only just begun.
The monitor cast a sharp, blue-white pallor on my face as the transaction history finally filled. For a moment, the screen looked exactly as I’d expected. It was a digital ghost town. Years of silence had passed, a long, empty string of zeros and inactivity stretching back to my graduation. Interest payments were pennies, gathering dust in a vault I’d forgotten existed. Then I scrolled to the top of the page, to activity from three months ago. My breath left my lungs with a sharp, silent hiss. There, dated August 14th, was the deposit. It was marked simply as Incoming Transfer, and the sender was Walter King. The amount wasn’t a birthday check. It wasn’t an emergency fund. It was $500,000.
I blinked, leaning closer to the screen until the pixels blurred. I rubbed the monitor with my thumb as if the decimal point were a smudge of dust I could wipe away, but the number remained. Five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million. My initial reaction wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even suspicion. It was utter, utter disbelief. My brain, trained to find logical patterns, immediately rejected the data. It had to be a mistake. It was a banking error, a routing number mistyped by a tired teller who had accidentally transferred corporate capital to a dormant personal account. My grandfather was rich, yes, but he didn’t transfer half a million dollars to a granddaughter he rarely saw, without a phone, a contract, or at least a card. This was money that arrived with lawyers and signatures, not with a quiet electronic beep in the middle of August.
I moved the mouse to the next line. Twenty-four hours later, on August 15th, the outgoing transfer: $499,800.
The balance dropped to almost zero in the space of a single Earth rotation. The money landed in the account just long enough to clear it, then vanished. I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking loudly in the empty office. This wasn’t a glitch. Glitches don’t clean up after themselves. Glitches don’t leave a balance of exactly two hundred dollars. I felt a cold surge of adrenaline at the base of my spine. It was the feeling I’d had when I discovered a rootkit on a client’s server—the realization that the intruder wasn’t just knocking on the door, but was already home, snacking from the refrigerator. I cracked my knuckles and leaned forward. If this was theft, it was sloppy. Speed usually meant panic, and panic meant mistakes.
I clicked on the withdrawal transaction details. The bank interface gave me basic information, like the confirmation number and destination address, but I needed more. I opened the terminal and ran a script I’d written years ago—a tool for analyzing the metadata of authorized user logins. I needed to find out who opened the door to withdraw the money. The system checked the bank’s access logs. It took a minute, the cursor blinking rhythmically. A result was found.
Device: MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 model. Operating system: macOS Sonoma 14.1. Browser: Safari. IP address: local 192.168.1.455 mapped to a public static IP address registered with an ISP in Redwood Falls.
I stared at the IP address. This wasn’t my parents’ house. I knew their IP range by heart, having configured their firewall myself five years ago. It wasn’t an estate either; Walter refused high-speed fiber optic because he didn’t trust cable, so he continued using a slow DSL connection that pinged from a completely different subnet. This login was from a high-speed home connection downtown. I copied the IP address and pasted it into a geolocation tool. The map zoomed in, placing a red pin on a building I recognized only from its architects: Vantage. It was a new luxury apartment complex downtown, a place that advertised concierge services and a rooftop infinity pool. I didn’t know anyone who lived at Vantage.
I opened a new browser window and accessed the county’s property tax records. They were in the public domain, easily searchable if you knew how to navigate the archaic government database. I entered the building’s address and filtered the data by unit numbers associated with the IP block. The search returned the name: Chase Lowell.
For a second, I held my breath. Chase, the man Hannah had been dating for eleven months. The man she called an entrepreneur, though she could never quite explain what he’d built or sold. I glanced back at the bank register. The login details used were mine. The password was one of my old versions. But the device belonged to him. The location belonged to him. I felt a wave of nausea, but I suppressed it. I had to be sure. In my line of work, coincidence was theory, correlation was proof.
See more on the next page
Advertisement
