He was already cold when I arrived.
Judge Octavio Beltrán. Known for his iron hand in the courtroom, feared by criminals, respected by politicians—somehow even more feared by them. Now, he was lying in a pool of his own blood, staring at the ceiling like he'd seen something shocking in his final seconds. Something that didn't make sense.
I stepped into the office slowly, careful not to disturb the scene.
Glass walls, modern furniture, expensive taste. The kind of place that screams power and silence.
He was shot once. Clean. Center mass. Close range. No signs of a struggle. No forced entry.
Everything was… too perfect.
Detective Romero was already there, arms crossed, eyes tired.
"Thought this might interest you," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you're the only one I know who doesn't care who the victim is. You care what the evidence says."
He wasn't wrong.
My job wasn't to speculate, or to mourn. My job was to listen to what the body had to say. And this body?
It was screaming something no one wanted to hear.
The autopsy later revealed what I suspected: the bullet entered clean, no hesitation. A professional job. But it wasn't just the cause of death that caught my attention—it was what we found in his jacket pocket.
A USB drive.
No label. No encryption.
Inside: court transcripts, altered testimonies, bribe records.
Cases he had ruled on… rigged from the inside.
It wasn't just a murder.
It was a warning.
And I had just become the only person with a copy of something someone out there would kill for.
That night, I didn't sleep. I reviewed the files over and over. Patterns began to form.
Names. Faces. Trails of money.
And at the center of it all—Judge Beltrán. Not as clean as the press had made him out to be.
But not entirely guilty either.
The question wasn't just who killed him.
The question was: why now?
And who else was on that list?