Chapter 10: What Remained on the Server
Maya waited while I sat down.
“The access records might identify a console,” she said. “Not the person who used it. I don’t want you waking up tomorrow thinking we have an answer we don’t.”
“What about the footage?”
“They’re still checking what the backup contains.”
I looked at the temporary protective order on my kitchen table. Adrian had told people I was dangerous. His attorney had sent over a financial authorization bearing my name. And somewhere inside the estate’s camera system, someone had used an account bearing my name to request that files be deleted.
“Tell Reyes I want to know whatever the records actually show,” I said.
“That’s what I’ll do.”
Before we hung up, Maya confirmed she had sent the witness-support contacts to Leah Price for Tess. Tess had been placed on unpaid leave for speaking about what she saw. I could not repair that with a phone call, but I could keep the promise I had made her.
Two days later, Maya asked me to come to her office.
Reyes was there when I arrived. On the table lay a slim folder, his notebook, and my smartwatch inside its evidence packaging. I recognized a shallow scratch on its metal clasp.
“Is that ready?” I asked.
“The examiner made a copy,” Maya said. “We haven’t opened the packaging. You can listen today, or another day.”
I wanted to say today before I lost my nerve. Instead, I asked Reyes about the vendor.
“The investigators obtained records from a backup the estate couldn’t access through its usual camera controls,” he said. “The request at 2:24 a.m. was submitted using an account in your name.”
“We knew that much.”
“Now we know where it came from.”
He turned a page toward me. It showed columns of times and system identifiers. Reyes pointed to one row without asking me to understand the rest.
“The request originated at a console assigned to Graham Vale’s office.”
I read the line twice. Under user, I saw my name. Under workstation, a string of letters and numbers. Reyes showed me the vendor’s inventory record matching that string to Graham’s office console.
“I was locked in the guest room,” I said.
“I know what you reported. The system record puts the request at that console. It doesn’t tell us who sat in the chair.”
Maya had already raised that distinction with me when the account first appeared. Still, I was grateful Reyes said it aloud. Adrian had turned an electronic signature into an accusation. I did not want to make the same mistake with a different screen.
“Could someone have sent it from somewhere else and made it look like that console?” I asked.
“The vendor checked the connection records. They say the request passed through that machine. We’re asking what it took to log into your account, who knew the credentials, and who could get into the office.”
I thought of Graham pouring another drink while I hung from the beam. I had watched him do it. What he had done afterward was still a question.
“What survived?” I asked.
Reyes closed the folder. “A few sections of ballroom video. The backup isn’t a complete recording.”
“Can I see them?”
“You can. I’d also like you to tell me if you recognize anyone in the parts we can make out. Take a break whenever you need one.”
Maya set her hand beside mine on the table, close enough to reach but not touching. I nodded.
Reyes opened the first file on his laptop. The picture had no sound. It showed one of the ballroom doors from an angle that cut off the beam entirely. A security employee stood near the door. Another crossed the frame, reached toward its lock, and moved away.
A woman in a pale dress appeared briefly beyond them. Vanessa, I thought, but the image was too small for me to identify her from her face. Reyes paused it.
“Tess said she saw an employee use a key at the nearer door,” he said. “We’re checking whether this is the door she meant.”
“It looks like it,” I said. “I’m not certain.”
He wrote that down.
The next section began later. Guests stood along the wall, facing something outside the frame. One turned away and brought her hand to her mouth. I could not tell whether she was Celia. A security employee passed between her and the camera, blocking the view for several seconds.
I knew what they were looking at. I could feel the pressure in my wrists as though I were still there.
“That’s enough,” I said.
Reyes stopped the video immediately.
For a while I looked at the grain in Maya’s conference table. I had wanted the cameras to remember everything. Their gaps felt almost personal, though I knew they were only gaps in a machine’s view.
“The vendor says these sections were retained in a separate backup,” Reyes said. “We still have to compare their timing with the other records. They don’t show the whole room.”
“But they show the door.”
“And people in the ballroom during part of the time you described.”
Maya gave me a glass of water. I drank half of it before I could speak.
“Elise’s clip is from the hall,” I said. “June’s is inside, but it’s short.”
“Seven seconds,” Reyes said. “It shows you restrained beneath the beam. No strike. We’re keeping each file’s limits clear.”
That mattered to me more than I would once have imagined. I had spent days answering claims that turned a few seconds of an encounter into a whole story. Elise’s video showed Vanessa stepping into my path before I spilled the wine. It did not show what happened after Adrian arrived. June’s video showed me beneath the beam. It did not show how I got there. Together with the witnesses, they were more than Adrian wanted anyone to see. They were not everything.
Reyes mentioned that his request for the staff schedules and the typed statement Tess described was still pending. Ruth, Marcus’s attorney, was also discussing how to provide records from Marcus’s phone. The message he said he had sent Graham had not been recovered or verified by investigators.
I asked if Marcus had called back. Neither of them had heard from him.
After Reyes left, Maya put her laptop on the table. The examiner’s report was open beside an audio file.
“The watch kept an audio recording,” she said. “There are portions where it’s difficult to hear. The examiner documented how the copy was made and checked the device’s time settings. I listened once.”
“Did you hear him?”
“Yes.”
I stared at the play button. When Adrian had ordered the ballroom doors locked, I had thought the people around us would stop him. Later, in the guest bedroom, I had held my wrist near the emergency phone and hoped the watch had saved something. I had not expected hearing it to frighten me more than wondering.
“Play it,” I said.
At first there was a scrape and a blur of voices. Then I heard Vanessa, farther from the microphone.
“Thirty.”
I remembered her saying it beneath the beam. On the recording, the word was thinner than it had been in the room.
Another voice spoke. Adrian’s.
“Hold her still.”
My hand closed around the water glass. There was a sharp noise, followed by movement against the microphone. I heard myself make a sound I did not recognize. Then the audio broke into a stretch of muffled voices.
Maya paused it.
“Do you want to stop?”
I nodded. She closed the file. Neither of us tried to count sounds or guess what the watch had missed.
For weeks I had carried Adrian’s voice inside my head. Hearing it from a device made me feel both less alone and less steady. I set the glass down carefully.
“I know that’s him,” I said.
“Maya nodded. “You can tell the examiner and Reyes what you recognize. You don’t have to decide anything else about the recording today.”
I went home to Nico’s apartment above the bakery. Luca called on my way up the stairs, asking whether I wanted company. I told him I wanted to be alone for the evening. He said he would check in tomorrow, then let me go.
Inside, I found the bakery staff closing up below. Their voices came through the floor in bursts I could not understand. I put the protective-order papers back in their folder and took out the note on which I had written the times: 2:13, my call to Luca; 2:18, my call to 911; 2:24, the deletion request.
At seven, Maya called.
“Reyes spoke with Graham’s attorney,” she said. “Graham denies submitting the request or using the office console that night.”
“Did he say who did?”
“Not to Reyes. Investigators are seeking the office entry records.”
I looked at the three times on my page. My name on a login had not put me at that desk. Graham’s name on an office door would not prove he touched its keyboard. I told Maya I understood.
The next morning, Reyes called while I was waiting for the bakery to open. I could hear a door shut on his end.
“The estate provided the office entry records,” he said. “We’re checking them against the camera footage from that hallway.”
“And?”
“The door reader logged Graham entering his office at 2:21 a.m. The hallway camera shows him going in.”
I held the phone tighter.
“When did he come out?”
May you like
“2:29.”
I looked again at the last time on my page. At 2:24 a.m., while I was locked upstairs, the deletion request had gone out from Graham’s office console. Graham had been inside.
