Page 117 of False Evidence
Tricia snorted.
Leah laughed. “I know, I know. Lee is the greatest hacker of all time. But I’m pretty damn great too. I once saved Christmas, after all.”
“I’m going to want to hear that story sometime,” Alexandra said. She always liked women who weren’t afraid to state their own worth and brains. Women in STEM weren’t always vocal about their success. Academia often had a way of putting the best and brightest in their place.
“Nate and I will have you and JT over for dinner sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“It’s a date.”
“So tell us more about Kendall,” Tricia said. “As a potential victim and likely collaborator, she’s the one we need to figure out.”
Tricia was right. They needed to focus on the crime. Whatever, exactly, the crime was.
“Why did she stay with Brent?” Leah asked.
It was a painful question. “Same reason as any victim of emotional abuse. There was so much gaslighting. And she did love Brent. I do believe that. She believed that. Every time I tried to tell her he was trouble, she was ready with ten reasons why JT had poisoned me against him. She truly believed JT had the cop plant the vial of drugs on him. The fact that the evidence went missing was just more proof it had been a setup.”
“But now we know she turned the corner,” Leah said. “In the recording, she’d switched sides to team Alexandra.”
“She must’ve known she was in danger, or why would she have put the recording on my old computer? But I don’t understand why she didn’t just call me and tell me what she’d learned.”
“She was trying to get evidence,” Tricia said. “She couldn’t find the money, and everything she had only implicated her.”
“She was afraid enough to hide what she had—and made plans to give you the computer—but also, from what she said, there’s more. Something you missed,” Leah said. “She wasveryspecific in mentioning Lee. She knew Lee could find it and was drawing him a map. She planned to give you something that you’d share with JT and Lee.”
“She might have intended to give me more than the computer. I was supposed to see her, but had to cancel when Gemma got sick.”
“One question: why was the hard drive not in the case?”
“She said the motherboard was fried. She intended to pull the drive and copy the files for me, but now that I was back and had my own place, she wanted to pass that task on to me. She was tired of storing it. I pulled the drive from the case before leaving her house that night. I figured it was better to leave the dead components with all the other parts that would be donated or recycled. There was a lot to sort through.”
“Was the motherboard really fried?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t check.”
“Clearly, she’d plugged the hard drive into a working motherboard in the days before her death. Was there anything else inside the case?”
“I was in such a hurry, I didn’t look.”
“If I wanted you to find something that needed to be kept hidden from everyone else, I would plant it in an old computer case and give the person—and only the one person I wanted to have it—a reason to open said case.”
“Do Brent or Russ know about the internal hardware of computers?” Tricia asked.
“I don’t know about Russ—I’ve worked hard to avoid him for sixteen years—but Brent knows how to use programs, not how to fix them. Kendall was his tech support.”
“Do you mind if I skip the dress search in the attic and search through Kendall’s old computer components?”
“I think that’s a splendid idea.”
“As long as Nate’s with you,” Tricia said. “We aren’t going to Scooby-Doo this and have you go off alone in a house where a woman was likely murdered. And I need to stay close to my primary.”
“Yes, Velma,” Leah said.
“As long as I’m not Shaggy,” Alexandra said.
Tricia laughed.
“Maybe whatever Kendall wanted me to have is with the—” She stopped abruptly as she realized how close they were to Kendall’s house. “Slow down.”