My Husband Dismissed Seven Ransom Calls as AI novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Three Rings

The agent came to Beth's duplex before breakfast.

She did not take off her navy blazer, and she did not sit down.

Eli stood in the kitchen doorway with his hood down and his hands pulled into his sleeves.

He looked about fifteen.

"Darryl keeps this phone in a coffee can under the truck seat," he said. "He doesn't know I took it."

The agent pulled on gloves and set the black phone on Beth's table.

She plugged it into a gray box from her bag, and the screen filled with columns.

I watched her face while she read them.

"Seven calls," she said. "Each one was saved on the phone itself, with the date, the minute and the tower it hit."

She turned the screen toward me.

"A voice clone is made after the fact. These files were written while the calls were happening."

I wrote on my whiteboard: WHAT ABOUT HER KITCHEN?

"That one is on here too. It was saved three days before you were taken."

Beth sat down hard on a kitchen chair.

"So she can't say Darryl cooked it up afterward," Beth said.

"She can say it," the agent said. "Her lawyer will claim the phone was tampered with. The lab has to certify every file before a judge hears it, and that takes weeks."

"Weeks," Beth said.

"Until then Eli is the only witness I have who isn't in a cell. He stays in this house and he doesn't text anyone."

Eli nodded at the floor.

"I'll take the couch," he said. "I don't mind the dog."

The dog thumped its tail against his shin.

I wrote THANK YOU and held it up.

Eli read it, and his ears went red, and he looked away fast.

At two o'clock every phone in Beth's living room buzzed at once.

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