Chapter 47

Chapter Forty-Seven

W hen JT and Alexandra joined the others in the main conference room, Erica jumped to her feet and wrapped Alexandra in a tight hug.

Somehow, she and JT had made it through reading the diary and discussing what it meant without tears, but this hug was her undoing.

This was the hug of a friend, not a lover. Erica had also known Kendall. Not well, but they’d met several times.

Next came Lee, who had been there from the very start. The brother she never had, and she was afraid her sobs might become audible.

She held her breath to keep the sounds inside. Finally under control, she tilted her head back so she could meet his gaze. His eyes were watery too. “I think you and JT might have saved my life that night.”

He nodded. “I’ve shared with the others the details of what I knew. We came to the same conclusion. It always seemed odd that a man who was on the rise like that would risk everything, and at the company party, no less. Especially since there was no evidence he was a serial predator.”

She pulled back from his embrace and faced the room. “Kendall said she and Calvin Moss pondered the same question that first New Year’s Eve. For her, it was her reason to believe JT must’ve set him up. But it was really Russ setting JT up. Whether I died or not, if I was found drugged in JT’s bed after a company event, he’d have been out at T&D. Plus, being a company party, Russ could get access to JT’s hotel room, which he’d never have at another time or place.”

“Why drug your drink right there in the ballroom?” Mara asked.

“By that point, he knew there was no way he was getting me up to his hotel room, where he could have drugged my drink in private. I was ready to leave. It was his last shot.”

“And he had to kill a certain amount of time first,” JT said. “Too early, and I had dozens of alibis, not the least of which was Lee. The effects of GHB take fifteen to thirty minutes to appear, and it peaks within twenty to sixty minutes. Not a lot of time. He would have needed to get her in my room before I left the party. Brent’s job might have been to alert him when I left.”

Alexandra circled the table and resumed her earlier seat. JT settled in beside her. “Someone else might have been at the ready to delay you if needed. Even to spike your drink. Make it look like consensual use of a club drug gone wrong.”

“I think we’re all on the same page with this,” Keith said. “Shall we start the video?”

“Just to be clear,” JT said, “we think Drake set Spaulding to the task of ensuring I was removed from Talon & Drake in a way that my father couldn’t object to. Facing trial for rape and possibly murder… Dad would have believed my innocence, but he would have been equally focused on the scandal. He’d just been reelected by a wide margin, so it was a good window for his reputation to take a hit and have plenty of time to mend.”

“Shrewd of Drake.”

“He was an excellent engineer—the ultimate planner. Very good at seeing the structural flaw in any design.” He glanced at Erica. “He was only brought down when faced with something he couldn’t anticipate when Erica zealously researched Thermo-Con. And in this instance, his hands didn’t get close to dirty. It was all on Spaulding to take the risks. All Drake had to do was get my room key, which would have gone unnoticed in the aftermath.”

“Spaulding must’ve had proof of Drake’s involvement,” Alec said. “That was his blackmail.”

“When Drake was arrested and I took over the Bethesda office,” Lee said, “I looked deep into Brent Forbes, figuring if Drake had an accomplice in the office we didn’t know about, it would be him. I never found anything conclusive.”

“Brent had to keep his nose clean, or he was out,” JT said. “Any involvement he had in the artifact and money smuggling would have been through Spaulding.”

“We still don’t know how the cop—Williams—is connected to all this,” Lee said. “I looked for a link to Spaulding and Forbes but came up empty.”

“Could he be connected to Drake?” Alexandra asked, then she shook her head. “Instead of speculating, we should see what Kendall has to say.”

She braced herself as Keith tapped the Play button on the computer.

The video restarted with the warning about reading the diary. She paused long enough to allow the viewer to do the same, then resumed speaking. There was a date and time stamp on the video, several days before her death. “Okay, so now you know how this all started.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “And how I spent sixteen years as an unwilling and sometimes unwitting accomplice to two horrible men. One of whom professed to love me. He lied. He manipulated. Gaslit. You name it. But still, I did what I did, and I was complicit.”

She swiped at her eye. “I’m so sorry, Alex. You were like my other sister. I loved you as much as I love Tanya, and I fucked it all up. I destroyed our friendship and my life.” She shook her head. “I felt like if I believed Russ was guilty and Brent colluded, it would make what I did so much worse. So I stood by my man. Accepted his lies as truth.”

The camera was probably on a tripod. Kendall rose from her seat and paced in front of the lens. “Nine years ago, Lee Scott hired me to work as a cost estimator at the Bethesda office.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I finally got my dream job, but it only added to my nightmare.”

Alexandra remembered calling Lee and begging him to give Kendall a chance. She and Brent were broken up, and the project she’d been hired to work on for another engineering firm was wrapping up. She was being laid off.

Kendall had been so grateful. She’d hugged Alexandra tight and thanked her profusely. But Alexandra had brushed it off because she knew Kendall would be great for the job and Lee likely would have hired her without the nudge. The part Alexandra had really played was letting Lee know she and Brent had broken up.

She’d really thought it was over that time. But then, working in the same office, he clawed his way back into her life.

“Within a few months of taking the job,” Kendall continued, “I noticed some discrepancies in the budget allocation on some of Drake’s long-running projects. I was tasked with auditing the projects and updating the projections. When I noticed the issue, I put a pause on one of the payments, requesting the invoice number and budget code. A message popped up, overriding my actions. It was locked tight. So naturally, I started digging and documenting. I set up a meeting with Rob Anderson—he’d taken over from Lee at that point—to show him what I’d found.

“But that night, I received a visitor at my apartment. Alex, you were pretty much living with JT at that point, although lord knows why. He was being a raging dick.”

“That’s fair,” JT muttered.

On the screen, Kendall continued. “My visitor was Officer Williams.”

Alexandra jolted. JT sat at attention.

Someone whispered, “Motherfucker,” which was exactly the word Alexandra had been thinking.

Kendall’s head dropped into her hands. “Williams told me I was to let the transactions go through, or my role in getting the charges dropped would be revealed to JT and Lee. I would lose everything. My job. My best friend. Face legal charges.”

She raised her head again. “I’m no dummy. I knew Williams couldn’t implicate me without revealing his part. But he…” She dropped her head again. “Oh god. I can’t believe I’m saying this. Fuck! ”

She slammed her fist on the table. “After…after the vial showed up again in my nightstand, I found out where Williams lived and showed up at his house. With a crowbar.”

“Oh fuck,” Alexandra said on a sharp exhale.

“Yes, I’m stupid. I was so angry and broken. That fucker made me give him a blow job, but he had to be lying about everything. I don’t know what I wanted to happen. He wasn’t home, so I smashed his windows. It was winter, and I was wearing a hat and scarf and gloves. But…”

Alexandra thought she was going to lose it in the pause that followed the but .

“I cut my arm on a shard of glass. Badly. I fled, but I had to go to the emergency room to get stitches. A week later, I received a police report from an anonymous email address. It listed the evidence collected from the vandalism, which included coat fibers and blood. DNA would be run when a suspect was identified.”

Again, she faced the camera. “I fucked myself.”

She took a deep breath and continued, “And so I let the money flow. I told myself actively stealing from the company and letting embezzling that had been going on for years to continue were two different things. Most days, I believed it. Some of the projects ended, and the amount of money being stolen dwindled. Then, about five years ago, I received new instructions. Anonymously this time. I was told to phase out the remaining payments. I was so thrilled! My nightmare was ending.”

She huffed out a breath. Then she dropped back in her seat, took off her shoes, and dropped one, waited a moment, then slammed the second shoe on the coffee table. “That, of course, is the other shoe dropping. My next instruction was to do two cost estimates on some of my new proposals—one for T&D with slightly inflated numbers. Nothing noticeable, but just enough , and the other more accurate with specific specs. It took me months to figure out who I was working for—it usually takes months for projects to be awarded. A pattern emerged. Not all the projects I did two estimates for went to the same company if T&D didn’t win, but the majority went to one company.”

“Moss & Delano Architects and Engineers,” JT said at the same time Kendall did.

Alexandra gripped his hand. There was still a chance Calvin Moss wasn’t complicit and JT could move forward with the sale.

Kendall looked wryly at the camera. “Of course, I dug into MDAE and learned that Russ was working for them. Buried under sixteen layers of subcontracts so JT would never know. It was well known among A&E firms that JT wouldn’t hire any sub that employed Russ. So Russ had to hide. He worked for a bunch of companies that had subcontracts with T&D, but his part was always small and hidden. With MDAE, his role wasn’t small, but it was deeply hidden.

“Honestly, it was a relief when I was told MDAE was buying T&D. I couldn’t be blackmailed anymore. I would be free . I was fairly certain Russ would move out of the woodwork and into the official executive branch, but I wouldn’t need to hide that from my employer. No more double estimates. No more nightmares. Hell, I’d learned that Officer Williams had moved to Maryland State Police a few years ago. We no longer lived in the same town or even the same county.

“I was going to be free.” She picked up a shoe and studied it and set it down. “It wasn’t so much a shoe drop as a wakeup call. I ended things with Brent for good at the same time I was forced to do double estimates. I was no longer able to fool myself into thinking he was ignorant of what was going on. I mean, I still wanted to believe he was ignorant, but I was done lying to myself. Honestly, I’ve felt nothing but hate for him for the last five years. If we stood at a crosswalk and a bus was coming, I don’t think I’d hesitate to push him in its path. I mean, I might get away with it.

“I never left work at the same time he did. Too much temptation. Think of the possibilities of a crowded Metro station…” Her voice sounded dreamy, then she sighed. “For the last eighteen months, I’ve been seeing someone new. Not an engineer. He doesn’t work for Talon & Drake. He’s an event photographer and the nicest guy.” She nodded to the camera. “Mark Kaufman. He gave me the camera that’s recording this and taught me how to use it. It’s got different lenses. Zooms and stuff, which has come in handy these last few weeks. So now we’re going to do a little slide show. I’m going to splice in the photos into the video. I’m not great at this, so bear with me.”

The screen went black, but Kendall kept talking. “Pausing for dramatic effect, but let me set the scene. A month ago, my boyfriend and I met for lunch in Bethesda because it was one of my in-office days. We were sitting in the front of the restaurant near the window, and he’d just given me a new zoom lens, which I was testing out. I raised the viewer window to my eye—I really prefer that to the screen—and zoomed in to a restaurant across the street. I nearly dropped the camera at what I saw.”

The screen flashed, and an image appeared. There, in crystal-clear HD, was a plain-clothed Officer Corey Williams seated across from Calvin Moss.

Alexandra slapped a hand over her mouth. Around the table, others gasped and cursed.

“Now, like me, you might be wondering why my worst fucking nightmare is having lunch with my very near future boss. Lucky for us, the information that a tech savvy person can find on the internet is a lot more detailed than it was sixteen years ago, when I first started searching for information on Williams. It’s even better than it was five years ago, the last time I checked. The other difference between then and now is I added Moss to the searches.”

The screen changed to show a graphic with a family tree. “As you can see, they’re second cousins.”

JT shot to his feet. “Goddammit.”

Kendall continued speaking from the grave. “Once I had that, the pieces came together. I still don’t know how Williams and his partner ended up taking the initial 9-1-1 call, but I’m guessing they were waiting in the wings after Brent and Russ showed up to threaten Alex.

“Remember, everyone was scrambling because Russ royally fucked up and was caught drugging Alex’s drink. There was video of him trying to convince her to take a sip—that didn’t go missing, by the way, just the vial and glass. Anyway, they’re in a panic. Russ shows it by assaulting Alex. Brent knows he fucked up for letting him in the apartment. They probably just planned to scare her. I’m guessing Brent took the vial from the nightstand while they were there and replaced it on New Years. Williams used the missing vial to terrify me. I don’t know if Brent knew what he made me do. I think Williams made his own rules.

“I was a puppet, all my strings being pulled by different men. One who claimed to love me. One who raped me. One who manipulated me into providing him with a victim for a scheme I’m only just beginning to understand, and one who pretended to be a voice of wisdom but hinted at how useful I’d be as a spy as long as Alex was with JT. I was thoroughly trapped. But now…now that the last pieces of the jigsaw have come together, I look at the picture and I have no fucking proof.”

She shook her head. “Nothing but a stupid vial that could contain anything and doesn’t connect to Russ at all. Just me and Brent.”

She held up her arm to show the scar that she’d told Alexandra she’d gotten when she slipped on icy steps outside their apartment building and was cut by a jagged piece of metal on the old iron railing. “The evidence only implicates me . I’m the one who kept the money flowing to Russ’s slush account. I’m the one who gave Calvin the specs to win the projects. I’m the one who was on my knees.

“The only way for me to win is to kill the deal. And so I will. But if I fail because Moss and Williams figure out what I’m doing, well, I’m going to document what I do know. Proof or not, the truth matters. I’m doing this for Alex. For Gemma. I love you both. Gemma, I hope I get to meet you. I’m going to do my best to compile everything and hand it to Alex on Saturday. The files on this disk include everything I’ve gathered so far. I’ll keep updating until I give this to the police, stop the sale, or am found out and silenced.”

The video ended without fanfare, but the next video was an addendum. “Oh! I broke up with Mark because I didn’t want to drag him down with me if this got ugly. And I figured I might have to have sex with Brent to get him to talk and couldn’t bear the idea of cheating on Mark. Which I did. You have the recording of the fun conversation I had with Brent after sex saved to the hard drive along with my diary.

“Mark doesn’t know anything, but…I really hope he can learn why I did what I did. He was the best thing to happen to me in a long time and for the first time, I think I get how Alex felt about JT when he wasn’t being a raging ass. Here is his website. Tell him I loved him.”

“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.”