Chapter 8 - A Witness Who Wasn't ThereElise sat beside Nolan at his attorney's office with a tissue in one hand and a practiced look of concern.

Elise had once been Blair's closest friend among Nolan's relatives. She had helped choose the wedding flowers and had sat beside Corinne at Arthur's memorial. Watching her repeat a lie on television felt like losing another member of the family. Corinne clicked off the sound before the interview ended. 'Don't let her make you hate everyone,' she said. Blair answered, 'I'm trying.' She realized that betrayal created its own terrible economy: every new lie made trust feel expensive. And yet Dana had opened her home, Ortiz was working long hours, and a nurse had stayed after her shift to check on Corinne. The world had not narrowed to Nolan.

On a television interview, she said, "Corinne has been increasingly unstable. We tried to protect her privacy."

Blair switched it off.

Corinne sat at Dana's kitchen table, furious rather than frightened. "I know what I saw."

"I believe you," Blair said. "We need to show it."

Ortiz arrived with a timeline. Elise's toll transponder placed her car on Interstate 66 at 2:21 a.m. It didn't prove she wasn't already at the house, but a gas station camera had recorded her buying coffee twenty miles away at 2:17.

"She wasn't in the living room," Ortiz said. "That part of her statement is false."

The detective had also recovered a short audio clip from a smart smoke detector. Its microphone activated during a battery warning, despite the router outage.

They listened.

Corinne's voice: "You cannot have it."

Nolan: "Then tell me where he put it."

A heavy thump. Corinne gasped. A second male voice muttered, "Enough. We said scare her, not break her."

Blair clasped her hands until the knuckles whitened.

"That isn't Nolan," she said. "Who is the other man?"

Ortiz enlarged the audio waveform. "We have a specialist comparing samples, but voice comparison is not certainty."

A new sound came at the end of the clip: the faint chime of a watch.

Corinne looked up sharply. "Arthur's watch stopped years ago," she said. "It cannot chime."

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So what had chimed at 2:09 that morning?