Chapter 17 Holt #2
“Or Mrs. Clark knew something Victoria couldn’t afford to have her know,” June replied.
“And she was a loose end that needed tying up. Just like she did to this cabin ten years ago.” She swallowed and glanced around.
“One last body in the place she caused destruction and heartache ten years ago.” She gave a snort. “It’s almost poetic.”
“I agree,” Holt said, turning to look back into the cabin. “The question is what Victoria was looking for.”
“Or what was Mrs. Clark looking for?” Rad’s voice startled them as he came around the side of the cabin. “Maybe Mrs. Clark knew something was hidden here. Came to find it and was intercepted by Victoria.”
“And then the storm came,” June said quietly, “and bought her another four or five days before anyone came out here. So she could disappear with Alfred and whatever it was she came here to find.”
Holt stepped back into the gutted interior of the cabin and looked at what remained of the floor.
The afternoon light was dropping through the open roof sections in long, pale columns, catching the dust that moved in the air above the pulled timber, and the cabin was very quiet except for the sound of the officers outside and the distant, persistent sound of insects in the tree line.
June came to stand beside him. “I just hope that Alfred isn’t another victim,” she said.
“I know,” Holt replied and blew out a breath. “Let me give the forensic team instructions and then we need to go see Tom to let him know about Mrs. Clark.”
Twenty-five minutes later, Holt and June climbed out of Carmen’s car, which they’d parked in the Morrison Mansion driveway. They walked to the front door and rang the bell. Only this time, there was no Alfred or Mrs. Clark to greet them at the door. It was Tom.
He’d moved back into the Morrison mansion two days after the forensic teams had cleared it, which Holt had understood without needing it explained.
Tom had lived in this house for most of his adult life.
The Sandpiper Inn was comfortable, and Margo ran it with characteristic excellence, but it wasn’t home.
Tom had the particular, stubborn attachment to his own space that men of a certain generation developed after long enough in one place.
He looked at Holt and June on the doorstep with the expression of a man who had learned over the past several weeks that their arrival on his doorstep rarely preceded good news.
“Come in,” Tom said. “Are you here to let me know you’ve found Victoria, Alfred, and Mrs. Clark?”
They followed him through to the front room. Holt looked at the space with fresh eyes now, seeing the absence of the staff who’d moved through it for years. The particular stillness of a house that had been thoroughly searched and was still reassembling itself into something resembling normal.
“No, we haven’t found Victoria or Alfred, yet,” Holt said carefully as he and June took a seat on the sofa.
Tom sat down in an armchair across from them, eyeing them warily.
“Okay,” Tom said, his eyes narrowing some more. “You only mentioned two of the missing people.”
“We found Mrs. Clark,” Holt told him. He kept his voice level and direct. Tom deserved the plain version. “At the old cabin near Ember Lake. She’d been there for several days.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Tom, but she didn’t make it.”
Tom’s face went through something that took a moment to complete.
Mrs. Clark had been part of the Morrison household since before Tom and Victoria had married.
She’d been there when Sienna and Clive were born.
She’d been at every Christmas and every family gathering and every ordinary Tuesday for decades.
“How?” Tom asked. “What happened?” His breathing became more rapid. “Was it murder?”
“We’re still establishing the full details,” Holt replied carefully. “Lucy is conducting the examination tonight.”
Tom looked at his hands for a moment. Then he looked back at Holt with the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he didn’t want to arrive at.
“So you do suspect murder, and I’m guessing your number one suspect is Victoria,” Tom guessed.
Holt didn’t confirm or deny it. He held Tom’s gaze and let the silence do what it needed to do.
Tom was quiet for a long moment.
“It looks that way,” Holt told him honestly.
“What do you need from me?” Tom asked, finally.
“We need access to the full security system,” Holt told him. “Everything the house has recorded. Not just the garage footage, Sienna provided. The complete system, every camera, every log entry.”
Tom nodded immediately. “Of course.” He stood. “I’ll take you to the control room. It’s off the kitchen corridor.”
He led them through the house, and Holt noted the details of the space as they moved through it, the rooms that had been put back to rights after the forensic team, the surfaces that were clean but still carried the faint, chemical trace of examination.
The security control room was a small space, fitted with a monitor bank and a central console, neat and organized, like a system that had been properly maintained. Tom entered the access code and stepped back, and Holt settled in front of the console with June beside him.
He pulled up the camera index first. There were quite a few that covered nearly every room.
They were positioned at the front entrance, rear garden, pool house, garage, kitchen corridor, main hallway, east and west exterior walls, the driveway approach, and three covering the upper floor landing and bedroom corridor.
Holt opened the recording logs.
He scanned the entries.
Then he went back to the top and scanned them again, more slowly.
“When is the last recorded entry?” June asked, reading the screen beside him.
“The day Victoria left,” Holt replied. He kept his voice even. “The morning of the storm.”
He clicked through to the footage archive and ran the retrieval for the forty-eight hours preceding that date.
The screen produced a loading indicator.
Then an error message.
Holt sat back.
“What does that mean?” Tom asked from behind them.
“It means there’s no footage,” Holt replied. He navigated to the system diagnostic log and opened it. The entries were there, clean and timestamped, recording every access and every system event going back months.
The last entry was timestamped the morning Victoria had left.
After that, nothing.
“The system hasn’t been recording,” Holt said.
“Even though the logs show it running, and every diagnostic check passes. Every camera shows as active.” He looked at the monitor bank, where the feeds displayed their current live images without issue.
“But there’s no stored footage. Nothing.
The entire system has been wiped clean.”
“Impossible,” Tom said, stepping around Holt to try a few things, but all the files were empty. “No. That’s impossible.”
“I’m afraid not,” Holt said, his jaw clenching. “Someone didn’t want any of us to find what was on your security tapes.”
“Do you have backups off-site?” June asked. “Does your system back up to the company that supplied the system for you?”
“Yes,” Tom said, nodding, and pulled out his phone, dialing the number.
Holt and June gave him some space to talk to the company, but Holt watched Tom’s expressions carefully and knew what he was going to say as he hung up.
“Apparently, I sent in a request to have all the old footage up to just before the storm erased,” Tom told them.