Daughter-in-law Strikes Harder

“The cameras were faulty at the moment?!” Dalton half-yelled in exasperation, and quickly minded the way he reacted when he turned to his back and realized that Aria was still sleeping.

He immediately walked away from the bedroom where they slept through the night, to the living room where he could hear what Alex had to say.

“Yes sir. The cameras were surprisingly faulty again at that hour, and we were not able to sue anyone because the cameras could not capture them. No news was published and everything here is fine.

They ran a test on the water, and apparently it was mixing with some kind of gas already. There was some kind of gas release beneath the pool, and it had not totally disseminated into the water before you were able to bring Mrs. Miller out. We are investigating everything,” Alex reported consistently in words to Dalton on the phone, taking no space like he was reading it from somewhere. He had done a good job and it was commendable.

“That is a good one. You can take a rest this morning and I will see you later,” Dalton said and made to cut off the phone call, when Alex interrupted him again with another thing that was really important.

“About the incident that occurred during the family trip. I finally found the owner of a building that was around the area at that particular time, which was also going to be demolished at that period. He still has the CCTV records from different cameras that were working perfectly before the demolition began, and I am meeting with him today,” Alex informed Dalton.

“You should get double pay for this month. You have done well,” Dalton repeated again to Alex about how well he had done his job, which made Alex touched by his new behavior.

He had never complimented him in the past even when he did the best, and was always rude, harsh and angry at every point in time. It made him wonder what could have made the billionaire sound so pleasant after a terrible day, and everything was connected to the time that he had spent with his wife again after his acting up.

The past few days had been really tiring for the assistant who had no idea why his boss was sulking, and refused to return back to the states or talk to any of his family which had him worried.

Dalton also remained indoors the entire day in the suite that Alex had to renew their time there, when he announced that they were not going back home immediately. It sure was a relief to see him back to normal.

“You are awake,” Dalton uttered when he saw Aria walking out of the room so tired, and he wondered why she had to be looking that stressed out.

“Yeah. And it is the best sleep I’ve had in a while. I’m feeling better than usual,” Aria told him truthfully, and he turned to observe the expression on her face.

“Do you care to tell me how you got these nightmares?” He suddenly became curious and she gave him a bewildered look, “I should be your first therapist, before you see your actual therapist today,” he smiled and she just rolled her eyes.

~•~. ~•~.

“Did you get the face of the person that pushed her? Zoom it closely, stop. Zoom again, stop. Yes, right there.”

“Face totally not so visible, sir. The distance is quite far,” the operator reported.

“Run the identity check,” Collin instructed the guy behind the monitor, as he paced restlessly round the monitor room. The plan all started a day before.

He had asked Aria to confirm the venue that they would be using for the party a day before, and had used his father’s influence to get into the hall, as if he was going to look at it as a similar preference.

In a few minutes of being alone without a tour guide that excused him, when he lied about a call that he wanted to make, and was able to fix spy cams into some good spots in the hall without getting caught.

After he was sure that the party had ended on Ellen’s birthday night, his assistant returned back to the spot to retrieve the cameras before the place became closed that night.

It was when he saw Alex that he was able to decode the situation, that the cameras in the hall were faulty and that everything that happened in the party was not accessible.

Collin got fast into action the next day and was able to check some reasonable of the videos, even though it mostly had footage of people blocking its view at intervals. The most useful of all was the one he found the perfect angle for among the designs, which captured the pool scene of Aria being pushed and Dalton rescuing her.

It made him mull deeply on what exactly could be going on with Dalton, for him to jump into the water without minding the crowd or his reputation for Aria’s sake. If it were him, he would gladly present himself and do it for her, because he was not as egoistic as Dalton.

‘Was there something else going on that he didn’t know? Or was Dalton already falling in love with Aria for real?’ The crazy thoughts that invaded his mind too constantly in the course of the identity search, made him insecure and jealous at the same time.

Half an hour had passed already, before they were able to get the perfect identity of the supposed waiter, who shoved Aria and sidled immediately. Without wasting any much time, Collin gathered every information to a top security national agent to help him find out the location of the identified guy, Jackson through his phone.

Towards afternoon, they were able to get all the call logs of Jackson and had it printed on paper, but nothing seemed off about all the conversation that he had on his phone. It made Collin anxious and angry, that they are heading towards a dead end without further clues.

“He might be using a burner phone,” the one of the agents gave a better suggestion, “It might take too much time to know the phone number of burner phone that he is using, and it is over if he does not turn on the phone too,” the man’s last sentence didn’t please Collin at all. There had to be a solution.

“Alright. Thank you all for your help, but please do not stop trying. I will also find a solution to this myself,” Collin appreciated and turned to leave their control room.

“Don’t do anything illegal, or I will be the one to interrogate you,” one of them joked as Collin made his way outside, and a loud laughter erupted from most of them in the room.

Collin knew that waiting for the burner phone to be tracked was going to be a waste of time, which was supposed to be put in as effort as the perpetrator would be busy trying to clean up.

His next line of action was to stake around the waiter’s place of work, which was an information he got from his database, since he also worked as a part-timer at one store during half of the day.

As Collin watched the young man from afar to get off from work after the day ended, he knew that it would be someone’s orders that the guy was following. It made him conclude that there was no way he and the supposed would not meet, within five days if he stalked him so intensely to his oblivion.

And just as expected, the young guy got off work around six in the evening, which was almost seven hours later. He followed him carefully with his car when he boarded the bus, and waited to see him drop after a few bus stops, which was quite unreasonable to him.

After a few minutes of waiting for Jackson to come out of the underground parking lot of a cafe that he entered for minutes, he suddenly noticed a car pull out of the lot in a very fast manner which made him hiss at whoever it was that drove recklessly. Realization soon hit. It was the same guy that entered inside minutes ago.

‘He had a car? How interesting it gets.’

Quickly, Collin pressed on his brakes too and went after the car, in a gentle manner that was so organized to not make the person in front notice that he was trailing after him. The car drove for a while on the highway, and then diverted its wheels towards an underground tunnel after a few minutes.

Collin increased his speed on the highway so that he would be in the same pace as the driver, whom he didn’t want to suspect that someone had been following him for too long. After they drove on different lanes for minutes, they ended up on the same lane again after he drove out of the tunnel. It was a rough one.

After many minutes of journeying far apart from each other into different routes, the car finally halted after driving into a temple in the outskirts of the town. The guy alighted from the car and lit a cigarette from the car, before he walked away from where the car was located towards a temple.

Someone walked out of the temple and the only thing Collin could see was a shadow, as Jackson followed the person he went to meet back inside. Collin came down from where he packed his car at quite a distance after reversing backwards, and entered into the temple pretending like he had gone there to pray too.

And almost into their trap he almost walked, when he discovered that it was an old temple, and that his disguise would be caught in no time if they sensed that someone was there. He turned back quietly only to see someone standing miles away from where he was hiding.

‘Had he not seen that face before?’

“You are so useless! Why did you release the gas a few minutes late?!” The stressed voice asked in a really angry but low voice.

“I am sorry. I shouldn’t have…..

“I should discard you soon. You’ll join the others where they all are, for messing with my orders,” a fire lit on a cigarette stick, and a hand pulled out a gun to shoot.

“Please,…..” That was the guy’s last sentence.

The loud sound took Collin off grid as he shuddered in so much fear. He had never seen someone shot directly to his face before.

‘If he got out of there alive, then he would do everything his father asked of him,’ he promised in his mind, as he glued to where he stood fearfully. A noise erupted from where his foot stood upon.

“Who are you?!” He heard the killer’s voice.