Chapter 7 - The Camera's Missing Minutes
The security contractor, a man named Paul Hensley, arrived at the house with Daniel's attorney present. He confirmed that the backyard camera had recorded the event, but the system had been set to overwrite older footage every seven days. Someone had changed the retention setting three weeks earlier.
“Who has administrator access?” Daniel asked.
“Your account, your wife's account, and one service account I use for maintenance.” Paul looked at his tablet. “But there was another login. It was added using your wife's credentials.”
“I can't tell from the name alone. We can preserve the logs and send them to the investigator.”
Paul showed them a gap in the footage from the night before the barbecue. The system had been offline for eleven minutes, then restarted. That alone could have been a technical fault. But the outage happened at the same time someone entered the study, according to a separate motion sensor.
Daniel felt the room tilt. “Can you recover the missing footage?”
Detective Grant arranged for a digital forensic specialist to take a copy of the system data. Daniel made no attempt to access the hidden account or alter the device. For once, he understood that proving the truth required patience.
“The way she looked at me when you opened the camera.” Jake swallowed. “She wasn't surprised. She was calculating.”
Daniel wanted to tell him that everything would be fine. Instead, he said, “I don't know how this ends yet. But you won't have to face it alone.”
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“Dad, there's something else. I saw her take a key from your desk last month. The little brass one you said belonged to Grandpa's old cabinet.”
That cabinet held the original papers for the college account—and a letter his father had left behind.
