Chapter Seventeen
After flopping onto his back, Derek couldn’t deny he was a coward.
Instead of asking Alayah to come to bed with him, he’d wished her a good night, walked to his room and shut the door.
After she’d opened her heart and shared her past pain with him, he’d treated her as though she didn’t matter.
When the truth was, she had become the only thing that mattered to him.
When he took Alayah’s hand, she grounded him in this whirlwind that his life had become.
There was a slight scrape on the wooden floor outside his door, so he climbed from the bed and quietly cracked the door to check on her.
He shouldn’t have been surprised to see her sitting at the computer desk, but he still was.
When he’d said good-night two hours ago, her eyelids were drooping as she’d climbed onto the sofa bed.
Deciding he should encourage her to go back to sleep, he left his room and padded toward her in his bare feet.
“Alayah? What are you doing awake?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to be productive,” she said. “I started mapping Cal’s route of running the torch.”
Derek couldn’t hide his amusement as he pulled up a chair to sit beside her. “You really should be sleeping.”
“So should you,” she answered without taking her eyes off her work. “But here you are.”
His smile was wide as she leaned in to watch the multiple screens that played videos from different camera angles. “This looks like tedious work.”
“The worst,” she agreed. “But imperative when getting the timeline right. If I can find the last ten-second span of time that’s missing, I’ve got Cal cleared.”
“Really?” he asked in surprise, and she nodded.
“We know he went from the conference room to the stage without stopping, but there’s one stretch that doesn’t appear to have a camera.”
“And ten seconds is plenty long enough to slip poison in a bottle or trade one out.”
Her nod appeared to be her answer as she clicked her mouse, the different camera angles enlarging and shrinking as she searched for her boss.
“As soon as I finish this, I’ll start on your journey.
I’ve already noted several places where I’ve seen you without the water bottle, so I can work back from there. ”
“Alayah, you really do need sleep.”
“What I really need is for people to stop telling me what I need. The only person who knows that is me.”
Rather than say anything, he stayed silent as she continued to watch the feeds until she clicked to pause them.
“I’m sorry. That was rude. It’s been a long week with a lot of work, but none more important than this. I can’t do a lot, but I can clear you and Cal of this murder charge hanging over your heads. Once that’s done, I’ll sleep for hours.”
Understanding how stressed she was and that he was partly to blame, he massaged her neck while she clicked the mouse. “I apologize for pushing. You know what you need, and I’ll do whatever I can to help. You can run circles around me in the cyberworld, though, so there’s not much I can do.”
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” she answered. “I’ll take a neck massage all day long after spending hours at the keyboard.” Before he could say anything, she clicked once on the mouse and did a fist pump. “Gotcha!”
“What did I miss?” he asked as she started writing on a notepad beside her.
Her finger moved to the screen on her left. “Watch.” Then she clicked the mouse and started the video feed. A large group of people was milling around in front of the conference room doors. They were obviously waiting for the doors to open so they could find their seats.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Neither did I the first three times I watched it, but I’ll slow it down.” After a couple of clicks, the video slowed, and she pointed to the right side of the screen.
“It’s Cal!” he exclaimed when he finally noticed the only person moving through the crowd and not just standing around. “He was easy to miss since he walked behind everybody to get to the other hallway.”
“Exactly,” she said with a relieved sigh as she leaned back in the chair.
“He’s cleared. There isn’t one second of his walk from the conference room to backstage that’s not accounted for.
Thank God,” she said, her shoulders drooping under his hands.
“Once I call him, I’ll need to package this up and email it. ”
“Maybe you should hold off on that. It’s late,” he said logically, stopping her from dialing.
When she lowered her brow at him, he had to bite back a laugh. “Trust me, he’ll want to know about this.”
Derek released her hand, and she called while he wandered to the kitchenette.
He made each of them a cup of coffee, knowing that her success in clearing Cal would drive her to keep going until she cleared him as well.
He’d do whatever he could to support her in that.
When he returned to the desk, he set the coffee down as she lowered her phone.
“Coffee with two sugars and one cream,” he said, sitting as she stuck a jump drive into her computer.
“You know how I like my coffee?” she asked in surprise.
“I’m observant,” he said with a shrug. “What did Cal say?”
“He had plenty to say about me not following his orders until I reminded him that I didn’t sign up for the army when I joined Secure Watch.
” Derek bit his lip to keep from laughing.
She did that to him often. “That said, he was understandably relieved that we can send this information to Detective Henry tomorrow to clear him.” While she talked, she was zipping files inside a folder and transferring them to the flash drive.
“He wants a hard copy on Henry’s desk in the morning, so he’s calling a squad over to pick it up.
Would you run this jump drive down to him while I keep working? ”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to email it?”
“Sure,” she agreed. “And I did email it to Cal, but this is an encrypted copy that only Henry can open with the code inside the sealed envelope.” After she dropped the jump drive and a piece of paper into the envelope, she sealed it and handed it to him.
“Cal said he’d meet you in the lobby to wait for the police.
I’m going to re-spool everything and start on the task of clearing you. ”
“Maybe we should just wait on this,” he said, slipping his shoes on as he held up the envelope. “Won’t we have to do the same thing with mine when you clear me?”
“Confidence looks good on you, Mr. Benjamin.”
“All my confidence is in you, sweetheart,” he assured her as he pulled on a sweatshirt.
“No pressure, right?” she teased. “Take that one now. It’s important to get Cal cleared in case he needs to leave to attend to business at home. It could be tomorrow before I can finish yours.”
“You got it.” He walked over and kissed her gently on the lips. “For the record, I don’t know what I did to deserve your help, but I promise not to let you down.”
Before she could say anything, he left the room, knowing the winds of change were in his favor.
* * *
“CAL,” DEREK CALLED when he got to the lobby. “I’ve got your get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Henry is on his way,” Cal answered, refusing to take the envelope.
“Alayah said a squad was coming to get it.”
“That was the plan,” he said. “But he wants to see the evidence himself, and then he’ll take the official copy back with him.”
“Kind of late for a detective to be working, isn’t it?” Derek asked as they waited by the main entrance.
“Maybe in the big city, but this is Duluth, and a huge tech bro died on their watch. I would imagine no one is sleeping until they find his killer. Especially since the clock is ticking as the conference winds down.”
“Did you watch the footage?” Derek asked, leaning against the wall.
“On my phone in the elevator, and I’ve got it ready to go on a computer in the conference room once he gets here. Our girl did it. There isn’t a second missing from the sequence. She’s the best at that kind of digital tracking. That’s why I gave her the job.”
“Couldn’t be happier you’re free of the suspicion,” Derek said with total sincerity. “The last thing I wanted was for any of you to get jammed up with this. You were just doing your job.”
“So were you, and Alayah will prove it. Trust the process.”
“That’s easy to do when you trust the person who holds your future in her hands. If she isn’t asleep by the time I return to the room, I’ll have to pry her fingers off the keyboard and force her to bed.”
“Good luck with that,” he said, the words laced with sarcasm.
“She’s like a dog with a bone when something eludes her.
She won’t sleep until she finishes the job she was assigned.
Then she might take five before asking for her next assignment.
I kind of love that about her, even though Mina has to continually force her out of the control room after her shift. ”
“I’ve known her for two days, but that’s easy to believe. She’s very much a team player, and I’m extremely grateful to her and the entire team for coming to my defense.”
Cal turned away from the door and stepped up to him, a little too close, in Derek’s opinion, but there was nowhere for him to go when pinned against the wall. The man before him wore an expression that said things were about to get real. He stood his ground and waited for Cal to speak.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to her.
I haven’t. While I understand that you were dazed and confused, the choices you made forced her into making choices she otherwise wouldn’t have, and she got hurt because of it.
Fair warning—that was your only get-out-of-jail-free card.
If you so much as harm one hair on her head, you will not be so lucky the second time around. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” he said in a tone that was confident in light of Cal’s posture. “The last thing I want is to hurt Alayah. I’ll beat myself up for the rest of my life that I put her in the position she was in with those guys. Trust me on that one.”
Cal took a step back and gave him one last side-eye. “I do, which is the only reason you’ve gotten within ten feet of her since then. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Wouldn’t cross my mind,” Derek promised as a car pulled up and Detective Henry climbed out.
“Gentleman,” he said when he approached. “This better be the real deal.”
“It is,” they said in unison, but the detective didn’t even crack a smile.
Derek handed over the envelope to the detective. “That is an official, encrypted copy of the proof. The instructions are inside. With that, I shall return to my room.”
“Stick with us,” Henry said as Cal motioned them toward the conference room. “I may have questions for you after I watch this.”
With a resigned nod, he followed the other men to the conference room. There was no reason he needed to stay, but he also didn’t want to look combative at 2:30 in the morning. He could spare another ten minutes since Alayah had her head buried in the computer anyway.
“My operative was able to track every second from the time I took possession of the bottle until I left it onstage, as well as where I went from there until the speech started,” Cal explained, starting the video after handing him a printout of the time stamps.
The man worked fast. Then again, Derek probably would, too, if it was a matter of not going to jail for a murder you didn’t commit.
He sent up another silent prayer that Alayah was getting closer to proving that he wasn’t responsible.
Something about being accused of a crime made you question whether you somehow did it and blocked it out.
Derek knew how that sounded, but he had run the scenario through his head hundreds of times over the last day just to double-check that it remained the same each time.
When he’d handed that bottle over to Cal, it had been free of antifreeze, and he’d stand by that until the day he died.
He just had to hope he could find a way to prove it.