Chapter 4 - THE DIGITAL HUNT
The war room was Sam’s garage. It smelled of ozone, old circuit boards, and stale pepperoni pizza. Three monitors cast a tri-colored glow over the trio as the rain drummed a steady, anxious rhythm against the metal roof outside.
"Okay, look at this," Sam said, his fingers flying across his mechanical keyboard, the clicks sounding like rapid gunfire. He pulled up a complex string of data on the central screen. "I managed to rip the raw video file directly from the 'Sherwood High Uncensored' server before the admin restricted access. I was trying to extract the camera metadata—you know, the digital fingerprint that tells us what phone shot it, the GPS coordinates, the exact time."
Maya leaned over his shoulder, her notebook open. "And? What did you find?"
Sam sighed, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Nothing. And that’s the problem. The EXIF data didn't just disappear; it was scrubbed using a professional scrubbing tool. Whoever uploaded this didn't just cut a video—they knew how to hide their tracks. This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment upload by a panicked bystander. This was a calculated hit."
Leo sat on a stool in the corner, his knees pulled up to his chest, staring at the frozen frame of his own fist connecting with Marcus’s jaw. "Does it mean we're stuck?"
"Not entirely," Maya said, tapping her pen against her chin. "Think about the timeline. The incident happened on Friday afternoon at 4:30 PM. The video wasn't posted until Sunday night at 11:42 PM. Why wait over two days?"
"They needed time to edit it," Leo suggested quietly.
"Exactly," Maya pointed to the screen. "And they needed to make sure Marcus’s narrative was set. On Saturday morning, Marcus posted a selfie from his bed with a caption about 'enduring random violence.' That primed the audience. By Sunday night, the crowd was thirsty for a villain, and someone handed you to them on a silver platter."
Sam nodded, bringing up a new window showing a digital map of the school network. "I also tracked the IP address of the initial burner account that uploaded the file. It pinged off a public router. Guess where?"
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"The school library," Maya and Leo said in unison.
"Bingo," Sam said. "Uploaded on Friday at 5:15 PM, less than an hour after the fight. The person who filmed it didn't even leave campus before they started scrubbing the files on a school computer. We don't just need the original video, guys. We need to find out who sat at computer station number four on Friday afternoon."
