Mia's apartment was small, cluttered, and smelled of lavender and burnt toast. Right now, it felt like a bunker.
Eva walked through the door, dropping her keys on the console table. The adrenaline from Vance & Sterling was beginning to fade, leaving a cold, sharp exhaustion in its wake.
She walked into the living room.
Ethan was sitting cross-legged on Mia's velvet sofa. A sleek, matte-black laptop rested on his knees. The screen cast a pale, blue glow over his face. Mia was pacing behind him, biting her thumbnail.
"You look like you just punched a lawyer," Ethan said, not taking his eyes off the scrolling code on his screen.
"I did the next best thing," Eva replied, taking off her coat. "I broke his timeline."
Ethan's fingers paused on the keyboard. He looked up, a genuine smirk breaking through his usual cynicism. "You told Adrian about the ghost ping?"
"I told him his closed loop was physically impossible," Eva said, walking over to the coffee table. "He knows there's a third party now. He threatened me."
Mia stopped pacing. "Eva, if Adrian is threatening you—"
"It doesn't matter," Eva cut her off, her voice steady. "What matters is what you found. Did you get it?"
Ethan dropped the smirk. He turned the laptop around so the screen faced Eva.
"Chloe's cybersecurity team is building a firewall around the precinct's servers as we speak," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a serious, technical cadence. "But I slipped in through a backdoor in the Medical Examiner's local network. I pulled the raw, unredacted preliminary autopsy report."
Eva sat down on the edge of the coffee table.
She stared at the digital file. This was it. The final, brutal confirmation of her nightmare.
"Read it," Eva said softly.
Ethan scrolled down. "Cause of death is listed as severe blunt force trauma to the cranium, followed by submerged asphyxiation. Time of death is locked at 3:55 AM. Which aligns perfectly with our ghost ping."
"What about the identification?" Mia asked, her voice trembling slightly. "Are they absolutely sure it's him?"
"Positive," Ethan pointed to the screen. "The ME ran the biometrics against the state database an hour ago. Fingerprints are a 100% match. Dental records are a perfect alignment."
Eva let out a slow, shaky breath.
A tiny, irrational part of her had hoped the police had made a mistake. But the physical evidence was absolute. Fingerprints didn't lie. Teeth didn't lie.
It was a perfect, closed loop.
A perfect forgery.
Eva's eyes narrowed. The curator in her brain—the woman trained to spot the microscopic flaw in a multimillion-dollar painting—suddenly woke up.
"Scroll down," Eva commanded.
"To what?" Ethan asked.
"The skeletal summary. The X-rays."
Ethan frowned but obliged. The screen scrolled past the toxicology results and the organ weights, landing on a black-and-white grid of medical jargon.
"'Skeletal integrity largely compromised due to vehicular impact,'" Ethan read aloud. "'However, post-mortem X-rays reveal normal bone density for a male of his age. No prior surgical interventions or metallic anomalies noted.'"
The room went dead silent.
Ethan didn't notice it at first. He reached for his coffee mug.
But Eva stopped breathing.
She stared at the words 'No prior surgical interventions'.
"Eva?" Mia asked, noticing the terrifying stillness that had overtaken her friend. "What's wrong?"
"When I was twelve," Eva whispered, her voice sounding like it was coming from a thousand miles away, "my father was in a catastrophic skiing accident in Switzerland. He shattered his right femur."
Ethan's hand froze halfway to his mug.
"It took three surgeries to save the leg," Eva continued, her eyes locked onto the glowing screen, tracking the impossible words. "He has a six-inch, surgical-grade titanium plate bolted to his right thigh bone. He sets off metal detectors at every airport."
Mia covered her mouth with both hands.
"Read it again, Ethan," Eva ordered, her voice trembling with a terrifying new energy.
Ethan leaned closer to the screen. "'No prior surgical interventions or metallic anomalies noted.'"
He looked up at Eva. The cynical hacker was completely gone, replaced by a man staring into the abyss.
"The X-ray is clean, Eva. There is no titanium in that body."
"That's impossible," Mia gasped. "You just said the fingerprints and the dental records were a perfect match!"
Ethan's eyes widened. He started typing furiously, pulling up terminal windows, his fingers flying across the keys in a frantic blur.
"I told you someone hacked the system before Liam wiped the cameras," Ethan muttered, his voice tight with panic. "I thought they only altered the traffic grid to hide their escape."
He hit the 'Enter' key with a loud clack.
"They didn't just hack the traffic cameras," Ethan said, staring at a stream of encrypted data. "They hacked the state biometric database. Last night. At 2:00 AM."
The pieces fell into place with a deafening crash in Eva's mind.
"They swapped the files," Eva breathed.
"They replaced your father's dental and fingerprint records with the records of the man they put in the car," Ethan confirmed, his face pale. "They hijacked the system so that when the coroner ran the tests, the computer would scream 'Arthur Bennett'."
Silence descended on the apartment again.
But this time, it wasn't the silence of grief. It was the silence of a shattered reality.
The man in the morgue was not Arthur Bennett.
He was a masterpiece forgery. A body designed to fool the police, fool the lawyers, and fool his own daughter.
"If the body in the car isn't your father..." Mia whispered, the terror in her eyes reflecting the madness of the situation. "Then who killed that man? And where is Arthur?"
Eva stood up.
She walked over to the window, looking out at the city skyline. The glass towers of Carter Holdings loomed in the distance.
She remembered her father's strange behavior in his study. The glass of scotch at 2:00 PM. The melancholic, terrifyingly calm warning.
"The most dangerous fakes aren't the ones hanging in a gallery. They're the ones we've been living with."
He hadn't been warning her about Daniel Carter.
He had been warning her about himself.
Eva turned around to face Mia and Ethan. Her eyes were no longer filled with tears or confusion. They were burning with a cold, terrifying fire.
"What if my father isn't the victim?" Eva said, the words hanging in the air like a lit match over gasoline.
She looked back at the screen, at the perfect, fabricated death certificate.
"What if he's the architect?"