Chapter 181 CHAPTER 181
Going all out
Someone higher up in the precinct had already been watching the social feeds. Within hours the story became a headline: MURDERED CAMERAMAN’S FOOTAGE REVEALS SCANDALOUS TRYST; ARES, TESSA NAMED. The push of attention forced a response. The police issued statements. A spokesperson advised restraint. The tabloids announced that Lila had fled the country. They printed a list of airports she might be at, and a photograph of her wearing sunglasses and a surgical mask, walking like someone used to having rooms cleared.
That evening the press conference was packed. Mara stood on the dais with a measured face and read from a page that had been written by her lawyer: “My brother Jude was a journalist. He kept records. Today I release those records. I seek justice for him.” After the microphones had snapped and the questions had scattered, she stepped down. The crowd parted like waves breaking off a jetty. The city hummed.
Lila’s plane had left hours before.
Mara did not sleep that night. She sat in front of the wall where she had tacked Jude’s best frames, photographs of light and people and motion, and she listened to the newsfeeds cycle into the small hours. People argued online. Conjectures and praise and invitations to conspiracy bloomed in comments. Julian texted, “Are you safe?” and she answered with an image of Jude smiling.
The next morning, the police knocked at Lila’s mansion. They searched. They found a burnt out laptop in a fireplace, a tiny stub of a destroyed hard drive. They found receipts for expensive taxis and a walk through interview with the gardener, who swore blind he had seen Lila leave at dawn. They found nothing else.
But the footage could not be erased. Once something is on the internet, it is like water spilled across a stone: it soaks in and stains. The clip had already been mirrored, downloaded, uploaded. The names circulated.
The city shifted under the weight of it. Mara watched the chaos she had catalyzed with a strange, unfamiliar serenity. She had wanted the world to see what Jude had seen. The world could no longer pretend not to.
Two days later, the detectives tracked Lila’s movements to a private terminal at the international airport; they found proof of purchase for a one way ticket out of the country. The carrier’s passenger lists confirmed she had boarded a flight bound for Europe. She had left with a small leather case and a look that said she would be back only in triumph or never at all.
At the station, the detective read Mara the report: “We have reasonable cause to suspect persons of interest in Jude’s death, including possible links to the owners of the footage.” His expression was square with detachment only until he added, “We are pursuing extradition routes and cooperation with international law enforcement.”
Mara wanted to ask him to ensure Lila would be jailed. She wanted the law to be as swift as rumor. But very quickly she knew a thing she had always suspected: the law was a blunt instrument that moved at the speed of bureaucracy and propriety. It would not catch the wealthy who could sit in airports and reroute themselves through countries with their pockets deep and their warrants thin.
When the police began the formalities of an arrest warrant, a storm of press and private investigators and opportunists swarmed the edges of the case. The footage was everywhere; how could it not be? News segments replayed the silhouette and the unmasking until the image was exhausted.
People demanded answers. The family of Marcus demanded silence and surgery to their reputation. Lila’s PR machine churned into motion overseas, brandishing denials and insinuations and threats that smelled faintly of legal teams and offshore money.
Mara watched it all unfold and felt the truth like a light shifting under a house. Jude had kept records not out of malice but because he believed that evidence mattered. He had paid the price with his life. His sister had done what she could when institutions faltered: she used the only tool she had, the same one that had fed Jude’s conscience, public exposure.
The final twist was cruelly poetic. Lila had burned the copy on the drive in her own possession to create plausible deniability. She had expected silence. She had not expected Jude’s tenacity, with records duplicated, copies hidden, friends who did not bow. She had not expected a sister who would not keep a secret.
By the time the police were ready to move, Lila’s passport photo had already been flagged by Interpol. It would only be a matter of time before word of the indictment reached the airport lounges where she had planned to rebuild her life. But Mara had learned something else in those endless hours of grief: time was both friend and enemy. For some people, it healed. For others, it merely moved them toward the place where consequences finally caught up.
She stood under Jude’s photographs, fingers on the hard drive tucked into her jacket. The city outside was waking up and smelling of rain and the sound of buses. The footage had leaked into the bloodstream of the world. The hunt had begun. Lila had fled. The police would try to arrest her. The law would make its slow, grinding course.
But for Mara, the truth had already done something that the law might one day formalize: it had made the powerful uneasy. It had made the silent uncomfortable. It had made the people who relied on lies wake up.
She pressed play on her phone and watched the snippet again: Ares’ face, unguarded and imperfect; the mask slipping; the woman’s reveal. Jude’s voice, recorded later as part of his notes, said simply, “If they think they can buy silence, let them watch themselves burn.”
Mara straightened. The funeral would be hard. The hearings harder. The months ahead would be full of subpoenas and threats and lawyers who smiled too much. But Jude’s face lent her courage like armor.
The police would try to make arrests. They would not be the first to try. Lila had already gone. The footage lived, and for the time being it spoke louder than passports and private jets.
Outside the precinct, a courier handed a reporter an envelope. The contents would end up online before the afternoon was
over. The city would not be silent again.