Chapter 11 - THE CONTROLLED MEETING
Ryan refused to go further until prosecutors guaranteed he would not be charged with Daniel’s death. They would not. The stalemate lasted two days, long enough for Greg’s defense team to attack the case publicly through court filings. They argued the guardianship draft was a hypothetical template prepared during marital conflict, that the brake cutter was an old shop tool and that Elena’s emotional involvement with Daniel’s reopened death was contaminating the investigation.
Elena stopped reading the filings after Rebecca told her they were designed as much for psychological pressure as law. Instead she focused on Ryan. If he feared Greg more than prosecution, the only useful question was what Greg might still do to him.
Ortiz proposed a controlled contact.
Ryan would call Greg’s longtime business attorney under the pretense that he had discovered Daniel’s missing evidence. Because Greg remained jailed, anything reaching him would likely move through counsel or family. The goal was not to manufacture a confession but to see who reacted and how.
Ryan hated the plan and agreed anyway.
He called from a monitored room and said only that he had found “the Miller camera copy Daniel wanted” and was considering turning it over. The attorney ended the conversation quickly. Forty-five minutes later, Greg’s sister Megan called Ryan from a prepaid phone and asked where the recording was.
Megan had never spoken to Ryan socially before.
Ortiz obtained a warrant for the prepaid device and questioned her. Megan insisted Greg’s attorney asked her to “find out what Ryan was talking about” because privileged case materials might be involved. The attorney denied giving such an instruction.
More importantly, Megan disclosed that Greg had asked her three years earlier to retrieve a hard drive from Miller Auto after Daniel’s crash. She thought it contained business tax files. Greg later told her to destroy it because the shop had changed owners.
“Did you?” Ortiz asked.
Megan shook her head.
She had left it in a plastic bin at her former husband’s garage and forgotten it existed.
Investigators recovered the drive that afternoon.
For several hours everyone believed they had finally outrun the conspiracy. The drive contained security backups from Miller Auto, including camera folders dated around Daniel’s crash. Then forensic technicians discovered the relevant forty-eight-hour period had been deliberately deleted before Megan removed the system from the shop.
Greg had erased it.
The controlled operation produced movement but not the evidence they hoped for.
Ryan interpreted the deleted footage as proof Greg knew the camera mattered. Rebecca reminded him that destruction could support obstruction without proving what the footage originally showed. Ryan became angry. “You want me to say I watched him do it.”
“Did you?” Elena asked.
Ryan would not look at her.
His lawyer ended the interview.
That night Elena received a call from the prosecutor warning that Ryan might withdraw cooperation entirely. Greg’s attorneys were preparing to argue Daniel’s death could not be reopened on speculation and that the current brake case relied on a tool with years of legitimate automotive use.
For the first time, Elena confronted the possibility that Greg could be convicted for fraud and assault yet never answer for Daniel.
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The confrontation had forced everyone into the open.
It had not produced the truth.
