I laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“You expect me to trust either of you?”
“No,” Julian said. “I expect you to understand that someone arranged the evidence to make you look like the center of this operation.”
“And you helped.”
“Yes.”
The answer came without hesitation.
That honesty caught me off guard.
“I thought Ava was moving company money into an off-book recovery account,” he continued. “I thought Ryan had approved it.”
“Why would you believe that?”
“Because I saw your authorization.”
“The forged one?”
“I know that now.”
Ava looked at him.
“You knew before tonight.”
Julian did not answer.
“That’s why you vanished from the hotel,” she said. “You discovered the signatures were fake and decided to protect yourself.”
“I discovered something else.”
“What?”
Julian reached inside his shirt and removed a folded piece of paper.
It was damp at the edges from the rain.
He handed it to me.
The page contained a list of names.
Mine was at the top.
Ava’s was second.
Julian’s was third.
Brooke’s was fourth.
Several others followed.
Beside each name was a date and one letter.
Most were marked C.
Two were marked P.
My name had no letter.
Only a question mark.
“What do the letters mean?” Brooke asked.
Julian looked at Ava.
“C means cooperative.”
Ava went pale.
“P?”
“Problem.”
“Who is marked problem?”
Julian pointed.
A man named Thomas Hale.
And Ava’s father.
Brooke covered her mouth.
“The dates,” Ava whispered.
Julian nodded.
“Those are the dates they died.”
Rain beat against the roof.
Downstairs, the old clock in the living room chimed once.
One in the morning.
Julian pointed toward the laptop.
“That list was inside a folder on the hotel computer. I photographed it before leaving.”
“Why not take the laptop?” I asked.
“Because this isn’t the same laptop.”
He lifted the silver machine and examined the bottom.
“The one at the hotel had a dent near the hinge.”
Ava stared at him.
“Then what is this?”
“Something someone wanted us to find here.”
At that moment, the laptop powered on by itself.
Nobody touched the keyboard.
The screen glowed pale blue.
A password box appeared, then vanished.
A video opened.
The image was grainy and dark.
It showed our living room.
Our house.
The camera angle came from somewhere above the fireplace.
The date stamp showed two weeks earlier.
Ava entered the room carrying groceries.
I followed behind her.
There was no sound.
We watched ourselves move through our own home, unaware.
The footage jumped forward.
Night.
I was asleep on the sofa.
Ava came downstairs and stood over me for almost a minute. She reached into her robe pocket, removed a small key, and unlocked the desk drawer by the window. She searched through my papers and photographed several pages with her phone.
Ava turned away from the screen.
“I was looking for the insurance policy.”
I ignored her.
The video jumped again.
Now Ava was not alone.
A man entered through the back door wearing a baseball cap, keeping his face turned from the camera. Ava handed him an envelope. He gave her the bottle I had found in the suitcase.
She laughed, then placed it on the kitchen counter.