Chapter 10 - The Truth Was Out of the House
Within minutes, sirens.
They rose out of the quiet Pacific Heights streets and grew louder, and then blue and red light was flashing against the drapes, and there were heavy boots on the front steps and a fist pounding the door.
“San Francisco Police!
Open the door!”
I watched Raymond’s whole careful world collapse in his face in the space of a breath.
The officers came in with state investigators and a search warrant naming extortion, unlawful drugging, and the production of blackmail material, and it did not take them long to find, in a hidden safe in Raymond’s study, the physical heart of the operation: hard drives, land deeds, fraudulent contracts, recording equipment.
A decade of crime, kept in a wall safe behind an oil painting, in a house where they served wine and asked about your week.
“Did you call the police?” Christopher asked me, as they were being separated and secured.
His voice was small.
“No,” I said, honestly.
“I didn’t.” And that was true, and it was the strangest part of the whole night, and it would take me days to understand it: I had planned to take my recordings to the authorities myself, later, carefully.
Someone else had been watching that live transmission as it happened.
Someone else, somewhere, had seen it in real time, and picked up a phone, and sent the police to that house while it was still unfolding.
Someone inside the machine had, at the last possible moment, turned against it.
May you like
I did not yet know who.
But I owed them my safety, and possibly my life.
