Chapter 11 - The Door Behind the Kitchen

Detective Brooks met Dalia outside the hotel service entrance the next morning. Dean went with them, leaving me a running account through short phone calls while I watched Mae through the NICU glass.

"She's gained an ounce," the nurse told me.

An ounce. I wanted to tell the whole world.

Then Dean called. "Dalia was right. Pike's badge opened the server room at 9:43 p.m., twenty minutes after the ambulance left. It opened again at 2:17 in the morning."

"Who was with him?"

"That's the part we're figuring out."

The hotel's primary recordings had been erased through an administrator login. But Dalia had arranged, months earlier, for critical footage to be copied to a second drive after a sprinkler malfunction destroyed another hotel's security archive. Most of the ballroom video should have survived on that drive.

Should have.

"The drive's missing," Dean said. "Somebody unscrewed it from the rack."

I closed my eyes. Maren had known what she was doing. She'd treated a recording of me nearly losing my child like a piece of trash to take outside.

Dalia found a printed sign-out sheet beneath a maintenance clipboard. On it, Pike had written that the drive was removed for replacement. There was no repair ticket and no replacement unit. A hotel engineer said he'd seen Pike carry a narrow black case into the freight elevator around midnight.

Brooks was able to request the elevator access records. Those records showed a second person had joined him from the private dining floor.

"Who?" I demanded when Dean called again.

He hesitated. "Owen."

I thought of Celia in her white dress, watching her wedding fall apart. I thought of how hard she'd tried to make excuses for the man she planned to marry.

"Does she know?"

"I haven't told her yet."

"Tell her. She deserves the truth before somebody else asks her to lie about it."

An hour later, Celia phoned me. I could hear traffic and wind through her car speakers.

"Owen says he was just helping Maren collect equipment," she said. "He says the missing money will be returned by Monday."

"How?"

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Her answer came so quietly I almost missed it.

"He says they're selling something that doesn't belong to them."