Chapter 7: The Editor
Chapter 7: The Editor
Across town, in a cramped, aggressively messy studio apartment that smelled faintly of stale pizza crusts, burnt vape coils, and cheap energy drinks, Tyler’s freelance video editor was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack. Leo, a chronically nervous twenty-four-year-old who practically lived in front of his screens, was scrubbing through the raw, unedited footage from the birthday party. The files had automatically synced to the cloud from a hidden, wide-angle 4K camera Tyler had tucked discreetly in the estate's lower terrace bushes.
On his expensive, color-calibrated, high-definition grading monitor, the horrifying truth of the evening was magnified in terrifying, ultra-clear resolution. Leo dragged his mouse along the timeline in Adobe Premiere, playing the crucial five seconds back, frame by agonizing frame.
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By pushing the exposure and zooming in deeply on the shadows cast by the ambient patio lights, Leo clearly saw Tyler’s distinct silhouette shift away from the crowd. He watched, his stomach aggressively churning with nausea, as Tyler's hand extended beneath the railing. There was a metallic glint—a small, serrated multi-tool blade. Seconds later, Bridget screamed her rehearsed, twenty-five-syllable line and plummeted backward into the pitch-black abyss.
Hyperventilating, his heart hammering violently against his ribs like a trapped bird, Leo frantically began copying the massive, gigabyte-heavy video directories onto an encrypted, military-grade solid-state drive. The progress bar mocked him with its slow crawl. He knew Tyler’s manipulative, deeply narcissistic personality intimately; they had worked together for three years. If the homicide detectives ever started knocking on doors and asking difficult questions about the rigging, Tyler would not hesitate to frame him. Tyler would expertly spin a web of lies, claiming his inexperienced, careless editor had somehow set up the dangerous suspension cables to get "better angles." Leo couldn't go to federal prison for a man who underpaid him. He desperately needed an insurance policy.
