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My fists clench. “Dammit, Molly. He can’t have deleted everything.”
Her hand stills, and she hesitates over a listing. Faster than I can keep up, she clicks it. A window opens, and she scans the contents before closing it again just as fast. I only caught the first sentence, Third meeting, same day, same time, Black Pony…
Her cheeks are flushed, but she closes the window and continues scrolling as if nothing happened.
“What was that?” My eye
s go from the screen to her face and back. “You found something?”
She shakes her head. “It was a false alarm. I thought it was something. I was wrong.”
Years as a policeman have made me pretty good at spotting a guilty face. “Was it something else? Something related?”
Blue eyes flash at me. “You’re looking for videos to exonerate Lara? Or at least give her an alibi for what she did?”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t a video.” Her face is back on the screen, and her fingers move faster than ever, leaving whatever that was far behind us on the path.
The next search term makes her stop. “What’s this?”
I grab a chair from the table and pull it beside her so I can sit. The link opens a window to another video screen.
“This looks like a hit.” Her voice is high, and my chest squeezes.
“Play it.”
She taps the triangle below the black frame, and images start moving. Again, it’s black and white, very poor quality. We watch as a figure, a man, enters a room carrying a long pole. He leaves for a moment then returns with a bucket.
“Wait…” I lean forward, studying the screen, running my eyes past the man to the setting around him.
It’s a bedroom with dark walls and ornate light fixtures. A couch is against one wall, and trash is on the floor. A table is smashed, a lamp overturned.
The figure returns and puts his hands on his hips, staring at the room for so long, I’m worried the video is corrupted and has stopped playing. Then he takes the pole, which I realize now is a mop, and dunks it in the bucket.
“It’s me,” I say softly. “It’s my first job… for Gavin. I had to clean blood from a room and burn the sheets.”
Watching myself from all those years ago in that place, I understand the feelings Lara wrestled with earlier. It’s haunting, but more than that, it’s alarming to think everything was recorded and is somewhere on video. It’s similar to someone reading your old diary, discovering the worst things you’ve ever done from long ago.
The events are dragged from the hidden depths of memory to the front of my mind, no longer buried under rationalizations.
“He kept the ones that incriminate us. None of the videos showing his involvement, the crimes that happened there, are still around.”
The truth is a lead weight in my stomach.
Molly watches me cleaning the bloody room in silence until I start to strip the bed.
Lara speaks from behind me. “Do you know whose blood it is?”
Glancing up at her, I nod. “I do now. I didn’t then.”
She waits, but I shake my head. I don’t even know Tanya’s mother’s name. “Someone Landry knew.”
Snapping out of her trance, Molly touches my hand. “It’s possible something is still out there. If he hid things, it’s possible he forgot where.”
I pull back. “Are you being optimistic?”
The tension in her brow returns as quickly as it left. “I’m only saying what I’ve seen. People hide things then they forget where they hid them. It happens a lot, especially with old guys.”
