Chapter 5
They did not use Daniel's computer.
Ruiz sealed the flash drive and sent it to digital forensics.
Vanessa was taken downstairs to give a formal statement.
Grace stayed with Lily.
Daniel stood in the nursery surrounded by evidence that had lived under his roof.
He wanted to break something.
Instead, he picked up the smallest drawing in the lunchbox.
Three stick figures.
One little girl.
One woman labeled MOM.
One man labeled DAD.
The third adult had no face.
Above her, Lily had drawn a black square.
"What is that?" Daniel asked.
Lily whispered, "Her phone."
Grace looked at him.
"She recorded Lily too."
Daniel felt sick.
"For what?"
"To make clips. To make me sound unstable. To make Lily sound afraid."
Mason entered.
"Sir, I found something else."
He carried an old tablet from the security office.
"Vanessa asked me last month to delete archived footage from the east hall. Said it was a privacy issue."
"Did you?"
"I deleted it from the local system. But the vendor keeps a thirty-day cloud backup."
Daniel looked at him.
"How far back?"
"Thirty days exactly."
Grace stood.
"When was the pool incident?"
Lily answered.
"After Daddy went to Boston."
Daniel searched his calendar.
Twenty-eight days ago.
Mason's eyes sharpened.
"The footage may still exist."
They went to the security room.
Mason logged in.
The cloud archive showed a gap.
Not deletion.
A manual camera shutdown.
Seven minutes missing.
Then the feed returned.
At the edge of the frame, Lily appeared soaked, running from the pool.
Vanessa walked behind her carrying a towel.
No panic.
No rush.
Just calm.
Daniel leaned toward the screen.
"Go back."
Mason did.
One frame before the shutdown, someone appeared in the reflection of the glass doors.
A man Daniel recognized.
Vanessa's brother, Kyle.
He had sworn he had not been at the house that week.
Grace whispered, "Why was he there?"
Mason opened the access log.
Kyle's guest code had entered the property at 2:14 p.m.
He left at 2:39.
The camera went dark at 2:19.
At 2:23, Lily screamed on the recorder.
Daniel looked at the log again.
Then he saw a second entry.
May you like
Another person had entered the house that afternoon.
Someone Daniel had trusted even more than Vanessa.
