Chapter 5 - SEVENTEEN MISSING MINUTES
Daniel tapped the screen.
The video skipped ahead.
Seventeen minutes were gone.
When the footage returned, Owen was sitting at the table with the tea already in front of him.
Officer Brooks frowned.
"Was there an outage?"
"No. The other cameras stayed online."
Daniel checked the driveway feed. Continuous.
Front porch. Continuous.
Only the pantry camera had a gap.
Sarah whispered, "She knew exactly which camera mattered."
Brooks took notes. "Who has administrator access?"
Daniel almost answered automatically.
Then he stopped.
He and Sarah had access.
So did one other person.
His older brother, Marcus, had installed the system two Christmases ago and created a backup administrator account.
Daniel called him.
Marcus answered on the second ring.
"Hey. I heard Mom's Easter thing blew up. What's going on?"
Daniel glanced at Sarah.
"Did you log into my camera system today?"
Silence.
"What? No."
"Someone deleted seventeen minutes from the pantry camera."
Another pause.
"Daniel, I haven't touched that system in months."
"Who knows your password?"
Marcus exhaled.
"Mom."
Daniel closed his eyes.
"Why does Mom know your password?"
"She borrowed my tablet last fall when hers broke. I didn't think—"
"That's the problem. None of us thought."
Officer Brooks asked him to put Marcus on speaker.
Marcus's voice tightened when she identified herself.
Then he said something that made Daniel straighten.
"Wait. If she deleted footage, check the cloud archive. I set up a mirror backup because Daniel kept forgetting to replace storage cards."
Daniel stared at the phone.
"You never told me that."
"You never asked."
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Marcus gave him the hidden login address.
The missing seventeen minutes were still there.
