That evening Aiden ordered take-out Chinese and ate his rehydrated sweet and sour chicken and fried rice while the data form the Fortworth’s security system played on several screens in the living room. At first sight, everything appeared to be normal: the energy field had been active all night; none of the cameras had recorded anything out of the ordinary; and none of the sensors had been triggered. He saw the deer Marjory had mentioned wander around the neighborhood lawns until the sun came up and the energy field went down. As far as he could see, that had been the only intruder that night, but he doubted that a deer was his killer. No, the killer had somehow managed to trick the security system, and Aiden needed to find out how.
He watched that night’s recordings well into the night and was about to give up because he had a hard time keeping his eyes open when he finally saw it: a barely noticeable fluctuation in the energy field. It had lasted less than half a second and had been very minor, so no wonder everyone had missed it. Aiden would have dismissed it as a simple flux in the system if he hadn’t noticed that the cameras around the Fortworth residence had skipped a second at the same time the fluctuation had occurred.
Aiden lay back in his chair, rubbed his watering eyes and smiled. He knew how the killer had managed to slip through the energy field and into the house undetected. The gated community’s unhackable security system had been hacked. A whole space ship could have landed on the roof of that house and none would have been the wiser. The person who had pulled this off had to have had top of the line computer equipment and pretty good hacking skills.
Someone had gone into great lengths to kill Professor Fortworth, much more than simple gambling debts would warrant.
“Just what did you get mixed up with, Steven?” Aiden asked the professor’s holograph smiling at him from one of the screens.
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Well that's the end of the first chapter. What do you guys think? Poor Aiden. He doesn't realize it yet, but he bite off more than he can chew.
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Of Broken Things
Science FictionSynopsis: When Aiden Stapleton, a successful private investigator, accepts to look into the murder of a seemingly ordinary college professor, he unwillingly crosses the paths of a government official eager to cover up traces of some shady research...
