Sixty Minutes

Harrison’s reflection in the hallway mirror was a predatory silhouette. Eleanor’s stomach lurched, a violent, genuine spasm that made her doubled over. She clutched the edge of the kitchen counter, the ceramic mug in her hand rattling against the marble.

"I think the salmon at the gala was off," she gasped, her face going a chalky, honest gray. "I’ve been fighting it since I parked. I need... I need a minute, Harrison."

She didn't wait for his permission. She bolted for the guest bathroom near the study, slamming the door and twisting the lock just as a wave of cold sweat broke across her hairline. She collapsed onto the tile floor, pulling her tablet from her waistband and propping it against the porcelain of the tub.

Outside, Harrison’s shadow blocked the sliver of light beneath the door.

"El? You okay in there?"

"Fine," she called out, her voice straining with the effort of faking a dry heave. "Just give me a second."

Her fingers flew across the tablet screen, initializing the remote desktop link to the computer just five feet away on the other side of the drywall. The authentication wheel spun. *Establishing Secure Connection...*

She had forty-two minutes left on the emergency PIN.

The master ledger loaded with agonizing slowness, a massive, multi-generational architecture of deceit. Thousands of encrypted rows populated the screen. Eleanor didn't hunt through the folders. She launched a targeted scraping script she’d pre-written at the office, a clinical actuarial tool designed to find identical tax signatures across fragmented data sets.

*Search Term: Desert Ascend.*
*Search Term: 4200 Shoreline Drive.*
*Execution: Extract All Linked Disbursement Metadata.*

The tablet’s processor whined. A progress bar crawled across the screen. Ten percent. Twenty.

"You're taking a long time, El." Harrison’s voice was closer now, muffled by the wood of the door. He wasn't leaving. He was standing right there, listening. "The study light is still on. You left your screen up."

Eleanor’s heart hammered a frantic, irregular rhythm. She hit the command to black out her desktop monitors remotely, her hands slick with sweat. "I'm coming out, Harrison! Just... stop hovering!"

Fifty percent.

She flushed the toilet to drown out the sound of the tablet’s internal fan. She scrolled through the live data stream as it compiled. It wasn't just payoffs. It was a vascular system of shell companies. Horizon Medical Holdings didn't just fund 'rehab.' It paid the annual retainers for three private investigators and a digital forensics firm.

Arthur wasn't just paying victims to be quiet; he was paying professionals to make sure they stayed that way.

Eighty percent.

The 2006 lake house files began to dump into her secure cloud drive. Witness statements from the responding EMTs that had been buried before they reached the precinct. A series of high-resolution photos of a shattered glass slider and a blood-soaked rug in the guest suite.

Ninety percent.

Her phone, sitting on the edge of the sink, began to vibrate. The haptic hum sounded like a chainsaw in the small bathroom. She grabbed it, her thumb hovering over the screen.

The download hit 99% just as Arthur's name flashed on her phone screen. The hour was up.