Chapter 10 - The Guard Who Wasn't There
I thought the parking receipt proved Rusk was lying. Sonia was more careful.
"It proves the car entered that garage," she said. "We still have to establish who drove it, and when he was actually at Juniper House."
The downtown garage was forty minutes from the residence at night. We gave the receipt to investigators and kept looking. Priya found a foundation calendar showing Rusk was scheduled for a late meeting with Beatrice at eleven-thirty, just minutes before the first fire alarm. That placed them together while staff on the second floor were looking for a way out.
Meanwhile the foundation's public statement called the old chain "a photograph of an unauthorized maintenance practice" and denied that any executive knew about it. I read it while Noah ate breakfast, my stomach twisting at every polished sentence.
That afternoon, I came home to find our apartment door partly open. I had locked it when we left. Nothing obvious was missing, but Lena's cardboard box had been moved from the closet onto my bed. A small envelope of family photos was gone.
I took Noah downstairs to our neighbor's apartment and called the police. They photographed the doorway and collected what they could. Ruiz warned me not to go through the rooms until they finished.
"What would they want with photographs?" I asked.
"Maybe they wanted you to know they could get in. Maybe they were looking for something else. We don't know yet."
May you like
Noah slept that night at Priya's sister's house with two trusted adults and a locked front door. I lay awake in my own apartment listening to every pipe knock.
At midnight an email appeared from an account with no name. Its subject line read: THE FOUNDATION KNOWS YOU HAVE THE NOTEBOOK. The message contained a photograph of Lena standing outside Juniper House with a rolled-up inspection plan beneath her arm. Behind her, reflected in a glass door, was Beatrice Kessler.
