Page 125 of False Evidence

“She knew she was going to die,” Isabel said.

“She did,” Alexandra said, “but she tried to pretend otherwise.”

The next files on the disk—they were numbered—included a series of photos of the four men she appeared to have followed over the last weeks of her life. None of the photos showed any of the four together with the others. The one lunch at the start was the exception, but then, she’d only had three weeks to spy.

There was a series of videos of her with Brent. Making out in her garage before they stumbled into the house. They were picked up by a camera in the laundry room followed by the living room, where they had sex. Thankfully, Kendall had blurred the image, and they didn’t have to watch Brent’s bare ass as their skin slapped together.

As she’d said, after they had sex, she confronted him, threatened him with killing the deal, trying desperately to get him to say something on camera that could be used against him.

Now the cameras in the house made sense. Brent was the weak link, but he also had the least to lose. On paper, he was innocent of everything. But with their history, he had the best chance of cracking. He was also the only one she could get easy access to.

But it was the last video that made bile rise in Alexandra’s throat and the hair on the back of her neck stand up. There was no tripod this time. It was a selfie with Kendall holding up the camera to her face. But unlike a phone, there was no selfie screen. Her face was cut off as she ran through the house. “Oh fuck oh fuck oh FUCK. He’s here. That coward Brent. He must’ve run to Daddy when he searched my office and knew I was close to crushing the sale. Fuck. I expected to have more time while he tried to figure out how to use me to his advantage again.”

She turned the camera away from her face and pointed it out the window to the woods behind her house. She hit the zoom and dialed way in. And there he was, a closeup on Corey Williams as he approached the house, dodging from tree to tree.

He was coming for her.

She turned the camera back on her face. “I’ll get him to talk. Fuck him if I have to. Or maybe I’ll cut his dick off. I won’t go down easily. This isn’t over.”

The video ended.

Leah cleared her throat. “I’d guess this is when she pried open the CD ROM drive and taped the camera disk to the tray. She had a few minutes, but not enough to open the case.”

“Goddamn. I wish she’d kept the camera rolling, but if she did, we never would have found this video,” Chase said. “Williams would have taken it.” He turned to Nate. “You and Leah searched her office. Did you find a camera?”

“No. But her sister might have it.”

“I’ll ask Tanya,” Alexandra said. “But she never said anything about Kendall taking up photography or having a new camera—and we spent hours looking at photos that day.”

“Williams probably took the camera,” Keith said. “Figuring he was getting the evidence Kendall had collected.”

“Williams probably killed her,” Nate said, “but we still don’t know who killed Williams.”

“Wait,” Eden said. “Keith, go back to the video that was spliced together of her with Forbes.”

Everyone groaned. No one wanted to see that horrific sex show again, even if the worst parts were blurred. Still, Keith complied.

They watched the video at double speed.

“Stop,” Eden said when they were making out in the garage.

The image froze on the couple as Kendall straddled him on the steps to the side door. “That’s a good angle,” Eden said. “It captures most of the garage. Too high for a tripod, but of course, Forbes would have spotted a tripod. I’d bet the camera was mounted high. Probably attached to an air duct or the garage door mechanism, but hidden.”

“A doorbell camera?”

“No way,” Eden said. “Far better quality. But probably motion sensitive. It clicks on when they’re already in the frame, and this wasn’t a professional edit. That’s raw footage.”

Eden knew cameras from her previous work as a camgirl, for which, Alexandra assumed, she’d done a fair amount of filming using remote cameras.

“She didn’t have cameras hooked up to her Wi-Fi,” Lee said. “I checked. No signals. No streaming. Her killer would have had to remove all traces, and from the number of angles we saw in some of the videos, she must have at least a half dozen cameras hidden in the house and garage.”

“What if,” Eden said, “she wasn’t streaming at all? What if it was all cameras with disks on a motion detection setting? Far better images, and she didn’t have to worry about signals giving her away. Power isn’t an issue when outlets can be screwed into a lightbulb slot so she’s not burning precious camera batteries. To save disk space, she could change the setting from video to stills.”

“What you’re saying is the cameras could still be in the house, with their storage disks intact.”

“Yes,” Eden said. “And she had a camera in the garage. Where she died.”

ChapterForty-Eight