Chapter Eighteen
“Come on, come on,” Alayah chanted as she rode the elevator down to the first floor. She had to find Derek and Cal. She’d been trying to text them, but when they didn’t respond, she’d grabbed her walker and headed down to find them.
She had lost track of time after Derek left, and when she’d looked up again, over thirty minutes had passed.
Maybe he was just having a drink with Cal, but it was weird that they weren’t responding to her texts.
Especially since she had news they would want.
The doors to the elevator slid open and she hurried out, looking left and right for any sign of them, but the hotel lobby was empty other than the receptionist at the desk.
She noticed the clock and realized the bar was closed, so they weren’t having a drink unless they were in Cal’s room.
Unsure what to do, she worried her lower lip between her teeth for a few minutes before she walked to the reservations desk.
“Have you seen a couple of guys down here in the last hour or so?” Alayah asked the woman. “They were waiting for the police to arrive.”
“Oh, they’re in the conference room,” she said, pointing to the left, where Alayah finally noticed the door was ajar a bit.
“Thank you,” she said with a smile before she hurried toward the room.
They must have decided to go over the footage together before parting ways for the night.
Cal likely had questions for Derek, and knowing Cal, a few choice words about her as well.
Everyone at Secure Inc. was known to be overly protective of her, which she appreciated, but it was also difficult to navigate when she was a fully grown adult and capable of making her own decisions.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Hugo Victor,” a man said as she pushed the door open. Detective Henry was slapping cuffs on Derek’s wrists.
“Stop that!” she exclaimed, nearly falling when her walker wheel got stuck on the door. She abandoned it and limped toward them, anger and fear making her legs tremble. “He didn’t kill Hugo Victor!”
“Alayah, keep your voice down,” Cal said as he approached and grasped her arm to keep her from falling.
“I’ll do no such thing!” she said, shaking her arm free. “What on earth is happening right now?”
“For your information,” Henry said, snapping the cuffs. “Mr. Benjamin is being detained for the murder of Hugo Victor. With your boss cleared of the murder, it leaves me no choice but to arrest his assistant, as he was the only other person who had access to the bottle.”
“That’s not true,” she said, shaking an envelope in her hand. “I can prove it.”
Cal helped her to the table to sit before he knelt before her. “You have proof?”
She nodded and motioned for Henry and Derek to come over.
She noticed that Henry had left the cuffs on Derek but hadn’t started Mirandizing him, so she’d take it for now.
“This was the official copy for the police, but since you’re here and can see I’m not tampering with it, can I open it?
” Henry nodded for her to proceed, so she opened the drive and inserted it, then decrypted the files.
“I’m not sure how this will prove he didn’t poison his boss,” Henry said. “He brought the water bottle with them.”
“Watch,” Alayah said, starting the video, and everyone leaned in to see it better. She had slowed it down so she could speak as it played. “Here, you see Derek take the water bottle from Hugo, who had just taken a drink from it.”
“The antifreeze could have already been in it,” Henry said defiantly.
“He keeled over on stage quickly after drinking about half of the new bottle. It makes sense that if the antifreeze was in the bottle he just drank from, he would have died much sooner than he did, taking into account how quickly he died after drinking from the one on stage,” Cal reasoned.
“To Cal’s point,” Alayah said, starting the tape again, “Derek takes the bottle to the water fountain, rinsing it out.” She waited for it to play, and they watched as he walked to a vending machine and bought a bottle of the vitamin water Hugo liked.
“He dumps the water from the vending machine into Hugo’s bottle and screws on the lid. ”
“That raises two questions,” Henry said. “Why didn’t you bring his favorite water with you, and why dump it in another bottle when it’s already in one?”
“I did bring a bottle of it with me,” Derek explained.
“Hugo drank it all on the way here. I can’t prove it, but Hugo filled the bottle before we left, not me.
Since it’s a popular brand, I wasn’t worried about not being able to get it, so I just grabbed a bottle from the machine.
Hugo preferred his water bottle with a straw because it made it easier to drink when he had his head microphone on. ”
Alayah hit Play again before Henry could interrupt with more questions.
She wanted those handcuffs off Derek. “We can follow him all the way to the room where I was looking for coffee,” she says, pointing herself out when the camera angle changed to inside the room.
“We talk for a minute, and then I walk out. You see Derek standing there looking around the room, not messing with the bottle, until Cal walks in.” She stopped talking as the tape continued to play.
Cal and Derek shook hands and joked before Derek handed him the water bottle.
Just to be on the safe side, she let it play until Cal walked out of the room with it, and then she stopped it.
“As you can see. He had no time to put the antifreeze in the bottle, and it couldn’t have been there to begin with because he rinsed the bottle out before refilling it. ”
Henry was silent, tension radiating from him as he stared at the screen. “It didn’t just magically grow in the water bottle.”
“That’s correct,” she said, holding up her finger and clicking on a different file. “I thought the same thing, so I went back to the feeds after Cal set the bottle down and after the stagehands were cleared. Look.”
With a click of the mouse, the static feed of the stage played for about fifteen seconds before the screen went black. It stayed that way for almost a minute before the feed returned.
“What the hell?” Cal asked, leaning in. “Play that again.”
After rewinding and playing it again, he stood and shook his head. “That’s weird. I didn’t see that the first time we watched the footage.”
“You wouldn’t have,” she said with a smug smile.
“Someone had planted a Trojan horse in the coding that looped the video for the minute it was actually out. No one would ever know the difference since it was just a static video of the empty stage. The only reason I found it was that I’d magnified the image on the water bottle and thought I saw it jump.
The same thing happened every time I rewound it, but it wasn’t noticeable when I zoomed out.
That’s when I dug into the video’s coding and found it. ”
“And that’s why we pay you the big bucks,” Cal said with a satisfied smile. “Well done, Miss Heath.”
Derek let out a sigh and his smile told her how grateful he was. “Thank God for Alayah.”
“This was a fun show and all,” Henry said, “but it doesn’t clear Mr. Benjamin. His literal job is coding. He could easily have done this with very little trouble.”
“Had he been here,” Alayah said. “I saved the best for last.” With a flourish, she clicked on the final video in the file and let it play.
It showed Derek leaving the convention center just minutes after Cal set the bottle on stage and long before the feed was cut.
He reappeared in the parking lot, removed his jacket and climbed in his car, then pulled out.
The timestamps on the videos showed that the stage feed went black at the same time Derek was driving away.
The room was silent as they waited for Detective Henry to speak.
He stood staring at the monitor, his jaw ticking to the beat of his case falling apart, and she hung her hopes on that final time stamp.
Finally, he walked over to Derek and unlocked the cuffs.
She was sure her relieved sigh was heard around the world.
“In light of this, I have some more work to do to confirm what was found. However, as of right now, the only person I can clear with any certainty is Mr. Newfellow. He may leave town. You may not. Do you understand?”
“Crystal clear,” Derek said, rubbing at his shoulder. “We both want the same thing, Detective Henry. To see Hugo’s killer behind bars. I assure you that isn’t me. I will do whatever you ask of me until you figure out who killed my friend.”
Detective Henry didn’t appear impressed by Derek’s impassioned plea, instead pointing at her.
“I need both of those drives, so our digital recovery team can follow the same trail to see if they come to the same conclusion. If anything deviates from what you just showed me, you’ll find yourself behind bars for tampering with evidence. ”
“I stand behind my work,” she assured him, disengaging the jump drive and putting it back in the envelope, then handing both to him.
“There will be no discrepancies. If your team has any questions, you know how to reach me.” Maybe it was the late hour, or maybe she was tired of feeling small around men like him, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of fear in her voice when she spoke.
“I’ll show you out,” Cal said, motioning for the detective to follow him. He turned back to them. “Sleep. I don’t want to see you before nine a.m. tomorrow. Preferably ten.”
The moment they were gone, Derek knelt before her and pulled her into his arms. “You are a rock star with impeccable timing.”
“Unless you’re Detective Henry, then I’m a killjoy,” she said, loving how his laughter rumbled through her. “I knew you didn’t do it, so it was just a matter of finding the proof.”
He trailed a finger down her cheek. “I don’t know how I got so lucky to meet you in this room just a few days ago, but I’ll thank the universe for that until the day I die. What do you say we go get some of that sleep everyone keeps talking about?”
Once he had retrieved her walker from the doorway, she followed him to the elevator.
When they stepped on, and it lifted them toward the reward of her hard work, she wondered if that was sleep or something else entirely.
While part of her wanted sleep, the other yearned to be held and loved, even for just one night.