Chapter 559

Chapter 558:

The glow of the dual monitors illuminated the tense, sweat-slicked face of Gaston’s Executive Assistant.

He sat alone in his locked office at the Collins Group headquarters. It was past midnight, and the building was completely empty save for the security patrols making their rounds.

For the past forty-eight hours, he had been funneling untraceable funds to a contact buried deep inside the Massachusetts state medical examiner’s digital archives.

A progress bar on his left monitor ticked slowly from ninety-nine to one hundred percent.

A soft chime echoed through the quiet room.

The encrypted file opened.

The assistant leaned forward, his eyes scanning the dense medical jargon and the scanned, handwritten notes from the original crime scene investigators. As he read the unredacted details of the Golden family crash, his blood ran cold.

The official public report stated that the car had hit a patch of black ice, spun out, and crashed into a concrete barrier, killing both parents instantly on impact.

The unredacted file told a horrifyingly different story.

𝖬𝗼𝘀𝘵 𝘳𝗲a𝗱 𝘁𝗁𝗂s 𝘄е𝘦𝗸 𝗼ո

The assistant scrolled down to the physical evidence log. Mrs. Golden had not died in the vehicle.

The autopsy notes explicitly detailed that her injuries were inconsistent with a frontal vehicular impact. Her cause of death was massive blunt force trauma resulting from a vertical drop of over eighty feet. She had fallen from the high suspension bridge located a quarter-mile down the road from the crash site.

The assistant’s hands began to shake. He clicked on the crime scene photos.

The report noted that the heavy steel railing on the bridge was completely intact — no scrape marks from a vehicle, no signs of a struggle. The supplementary notes made the cover-up even more chilling in its thoroughness. The first-responding police officer had resigned two weeks after the incident and vanished without a trace. The original medical examiner had been abruptly transferred to a remote, desk-duty position in another state. Every original dispatch log and physical evidence tag had been meticulously scrubbed and replaced.

It meant that Mrs. Golden had either climbed over the railing herself in the freezing rain, or someone had physically thrown her over.

This was not a tragic accident. It was a covered-up suicide — or a highly sophisticated murder. And Conrad Sterling had buried it.

The assistant hit the print command. The laser printer hummed and spat out five crucial pages. He grabbed the warm papers, shoved them into a manila envelope, and immediately ran military-grade wiping software on his hard drive, erasing every trace of the accessed files.

He pulled out a burner phone and sent a single encrypted text to Jocelyn.

“Check your secure drop box. It is worse than we thought p>

The following morning, Jocelyn sat in the back of her Maybach as it sped toward Chelsea.