Chapter 14: The Deposition
The main conference hall of the District Attorney’s office was a room of sandblasted glass and gray concrete, overlooking the cold, gray expanse of the harbor. At 11:00 a.m., the video deposition was underway, the red light of the primary camera glowing steadily on the wall unit.
Ryan Miller sat at the far end of the table, his hands cuffed to the iron security link below the wood grain, his head lowered, his face completely pale under the fluorescent lights. Beside him, his defense counsel sat in total silence, their legal folders closed.
I sat at the opposite end of the table, my posture perfectly rigid, my voice data-driven, clear, carrying an icy authority that cut through the low click of the court reporter’s machine.
"On the night of Thursday, November eleventh," I testified, my eyes locked onto the camera lens, "I was alerted to an emergency incident involving my nineteen-year-old child, Lily Mercer, who had been targeted in a severe physiological trauma loop near the campus science sector. The defendant, Ryan Miller, entered the network infrastructure to manually eliminate the server surveillance tracking arrays to mask an ongoing corporate extraction pool."
The prosecutor leaned forward, his face serious. "And what was the nature of your financial relationship prior to that morning, Mr. Mercer?"
"It was a relationship of systematic, unmitigated financial extraction," I said coldly. "Over twenty-four months, the defendant utilized forged cryptographic signature keys to siphon corporate funds from Core Dynamics to fund his brother's accounts. The transactions were masked through a network of shell companies registered in Delaware."
Ryan slowly lifted his head, his bloodshot eyes looking at me across the table, his voice a low, broken sob. "Daniel... please... I was trying to protect Ryan... Mom was pushing me... I didn't think the compliance trackers would pick it up..."
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"The tracking parameters are absolute, Ryan," I replied, my voice perfectly level, completely drained of emotion. "You did not view my daughter as a human being; you viewed this infrastructure as an unregulated liquidity source to cover your liabilities. But you miscalculated the risk metrics."
His defense counsel leaned over the table, sliding the signed asset waiver documents across the polished wood toward the prosecutor. "The defendant has signed the total waiver of assets, Your Honor. We are requesting an immediate integration of the plea agreement to skip the grand jury trial."
