Chapter 17 - The Wrong Suspect

I showed Price the message immediately. He verified the evidence photograph had been taken during an authorized examination, meaning someone with access had leaked it. Holt's fingerprints had been found on the knife, but they did not match every print on the handle. Another partial impression remained unidentified.

“Maybe he's trying to confuse the case,” Adrian said.

“Probably,” Price answered. “But we don't get to ignore evidence because we dislike the source.”

I appreciated that more than he knew. A week earlier, everyone had been ready to judge me by a set of manufactured logs.

Price traced the leak to a contractor who had worked for Charles's foundation. Under questioning, the contractor admitted taking a photograph of the knife for Holt in exchange for money. He also described an instruction to place the weapon near Sophie's room to frame me. Holt had apparently panicked when Sophie refused to stay hidden and improvised the story that he'd caught me carrying it.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because your father knew their account structure,” Naomi said. “And because you came looking. Charles wanted Adrian to distrust the one employee asking the right questions.”

A judge approved further forensic testing. The unidentified partial print matched an old stored item linked to Evelyn. That did not prove she planted the knife; it suggested the weapon had belonged to her, or someone had handled it when she was alive.

In the study, Adrian found a receipt for a custom kitchen set Evelyn had ordered years earlier. One piece was missing: a narrow carving knife with a distinctive scratch in its silver collar. She had marked it deliberately as a reference point in her evidence photographs.

“It was never a murder weapon,” I realized. “She used it as a sign. She wanted someone to notice the key.”

Price agreed the sequence was plausible but urged us not to treat a theory as fact until more records were checked.

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That evening the forensic lab called Naomi. The final recovered audio track from Evelyn's recording was ready.

There was a man's voice on it, clear and unmistakable, saying, “If Adrian finds the ledger, take the little girl first.”