Page 123 of False Evidence
Next came Lee, who had been there from the very start. The brother she never had, and she was afraid her sobs might become audible.
She held her breath to keep the sounds inside. Finally under control, she tilted her head back so she could meet his gaze. His eyes were watery too. “I think you and JT might have saved my life that night.”
He nodded. “I’ve shared with the others the details of what I knew. We came to the same conclusion. It always seemed odd that a man who was on the rise like that would risk everything, and at the company party, no less. Especially since there was no evidence he was a serial predator.”
She pulled back from his embrace and faced the room. “Kendall said she and Calvin Moss pondered the same question that first New Year’s Eve. For her, it was her reason to believe JT must’ve set him up. But it was really Russ setting JT up. Whether I died or not, if I was found drugged in JT’s bed after a company event, he’d have been out at T&D. Plus, being a company party, Russ could get access to JT’s hotel room, which he’d never have at another time or place.”
“Why drug your drink right there in the ballroom?” Mara asked.
“By that point, he knew there was no way he was getting me up to his hotel room, where he could have drugged my drink in private. I was ready to leave. It was his last shot.”
“And he had to kill a certain amount of time first,” JT said. “Too early, and I had dozens of alibis, not the least of which was Lee. The effects of GHB take fifteen to thirty minutes to appear, and it peaks within twenty to sixty minutes. Not a lot of time. He would have needed to get her in my room before I left the party. Brent’s job might have been to alert him when I left.”
Alexandra circled the table and resumed her earlier seat. JT settled in beside her. “Someone else might have been at the ready to delay you if needed. Even to spike your drink. Make it look like consensual use of a club drug gone wrong.”
“I think we’re all on the same page with this,” Keith said. “Shall we start the video?”
“Just to be clear,” JT said, “we think Drake set Spaulding to the task of ensuring I was removed from Talon & Drake in a way that my father couldn’t object to. Facing trial for rape and possibly murder… Dad would have believed my innocence, but he would have been equally focused on the scandal. He’d just been reelected by a wide margin, so it was a good window for his reputation to take a hit and have plenty of time to mend.”
“Shrewd of Drake.”
“He was an excellent engineer—the ultimate planner. Very good at seeing the structural flaw in any design.” He glanced at Erica. “He was only brought down when faced with something he couldn’t anticipate when Erica zealously researched Thermo-Con. And in this instance, his hands didn’t get close to dirty. It was all on Spaulding to take the risks. All Drake had to do was get my room key, which would have gone unnoticed in the aftermath.”
“Spaulding must’ve had proof of Drake’s involvement,” Alec said. “That was his blackmail.”
“When Drake was arrested and I took over the Bethesda office,” Lee said, “I looked deep into Brent Forbes, figuring if Drake had an accomplice in the office we didn’t know about, it would be him. I never found anything conclusive.”
“Brent had to keep his nose clean, or he was out,” JT said. “Any involvement he had in the artifact and money smuggling would have been through Spaulding.”
“We still don’t know how the cop—Williams—is connected to all this,” Lee said. “I looked for a link to Spaulding and Forbes but came up empty.”
“Could he be connected to Drake?” Alexandra asked, then she shook her head. “Instead of speculating, we should see what Kendall has to say.”
She braced herself as Keith tapped the Play button on the computer.
The video restarted with the warning about reading the diary. She paused long enough to allow the viewer to do the same, then resumed speaking. There was a date and time stamp on the video, several days before her death. “Okay, so now you know how this all started.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “And how I spent sixteen years as an unwilling and sometimes unwitting accomplice to two horrible men. One of whom professed to love me. He lied. He manipulated. Gaslit. You name it. But still, I did what I did, and Iwascomplicit.”
She swiped at her eye. “I’m so sorry, Alex. You were like my other sister. I loved you as much as I love Tanya, and I fucked it all up. I destroyed our friendship and my life.” She shook her head. “I felt like if I believed Russ was guilty and Brent colluded, it would make what I did so much worse. So I stood by my man. Accepted his lies as truth.”
The camera was probably on a tripod. Kendall rose from her seat and paced in front of the lens. “Nine years ago, Lee Scott hired me to work as a cost estimator at the Bethesda office.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I finally got my dream job, but it only added to my nightmare.”
Alexandra remembered calling Lee and begging him to give Kendall a chance. She and Brent were broken up, and the project she’d been hired to work on for another engineering firm was wrapping up. She was being laid off.
Kendall had been so grateful. She’d hugged Alexandra tight and thanked her profusely. But Alexandra had brushed it off because she knew Kendall would be great for the job and Lee likely would have hired her without the nudge. The part Alexandra had really played was letting Lee know she and Brent had broken up.
She’d really thought it was over that time. But then, working in the same office, he clawed his way back into her life.
“Within a few months of taking the job,” Kendall continued, “I noticed some discrepancies in the budget allocation on some of Drake’s long-running projects. I was tasked with auditing the projects and updating the projections. When I noticed the issue, I put a pause on one of the payments, requesting the invoice number and budget code. A message popped up, overriding my actions. It was locked tight. So naturally, I started digging and documenting. I set up a meeting with Rob Anderson—he’d taken over from Lee at that point—to show him what I’d found.
“But that night, I received a visitor at my apartment. Alex, you were pretty much living with JT at that point, although lord knows why. He was being a raging dick.”
“That’s fair,” JT muttered.
On the screen, Kendall continued. “My visitor was Officer Williams.”
Alexandra jolted. JT sat at attention.
Someone whispered, “Motherfucker,” which was exactly the word Alexandra had been thinking.