Chapter 5 - THE TECHNICIAN
Owen Mercer refused coffee, water, and every attempt at small talk.
He sat across from Detective Brooks in a small interview room while I watched through a glass partition with Rachel.
He looked nervous before anyone asked a question.
That told me nothing legally.
Emotion wasn’t proof.
But then Brooks placed the Halcyon Security invoice in front of him.
His shoulders dropped.
“I knew this would come back.”
Brooks kept her voice calm.
“What happened at the Carter residence?”
Owen rubbed both hands over his face.
“Mrs. Carter called the morning after Mr. Edward Carter died.”
“Which Mrs. Carter?”
“Vanessa.”
My stomach tightened.
“She told me a camera had recorded something private and traumatic. Said the family didn’t want copies floating around.”
“What did she ask you to do?”
“Export the staircase archive and wipe the local cache.”
Rachel glanced at me.
Brooks asked, “Was that normal?”
“No.”
“Legal?”
“Deleting a homeowner’s own footage isn’t automatically illegal if the authorized account holder requests it. But she wasn’t the account holder.”
“Who was?”
“Daniel Carter.”
My breath caught.
“Why did you do it?”
Owen looked ashamed.
“She had his password.”
“Did you watch the recording?”
“A few seconds.”
Everything inside me became still.
“What did you see?”
Brooks asked it, not me.
Owen stared down.
“Mr. Carter was alive at the top of the stairs.”
I grabbed the edge of the viewing counter.
“Was he alone?”
“No.”
“With who?”
Owen swallowed.
“I couldn’t see the person’s face clearly. They were near the blind side by the study entrance.”
My hope dropped.
Brooks continued.
“What happened?”
“They argued.”
“Could you hear them?”
“Not through my service console.”
“Then?”
“Mr. Carter moved backward. The other person moved toward him. The feed froze for maybe half a second.”
“And after?”
“He was falling.”
Not enough.
Not yet.
But it destroyed one part of the original account.
Vanessa had told police Dad was already lying unconscious when she came downstairs.
The footage showed him standing and arguing with someone seconds before his fall.
“Did you keep a copy?” Brooks asked.
Owen hesitated.
“No.”
Brooks noticed.
“So that answer is final?”
He looked at the camera in the interview-room ceiling.
“I didn’t keep the video.”
“What did you keep?”
Owen’s eyes closed.
“A diagnostic package.”
Rachel leaned toward the glass.
The technician explained that his company software automatically created encrypted troubleshooting bundles whenever an archive extraction failed or froze.
The bundle wouldn’t contain a normal playable video.
But it might contain thumbnails, timestamps, system events, and corrupted media fragments.
“Where is it?”
“Old company storage.”
“Can it be recovered?”
“Maybe.”
Brooks asked the final question.
“Why did Vanessa want the archive deleted?”
Owen’s answer changed everything again.
“She said Daniel had already approved it.”
I stared through the glass.
Vanessa hadn’t only erased Dad’s last minutes.
May you like
She had used my name to do it.
📖 The technician confirmed the staircase footage had existed, but recovering even fragments of it could turn my father’s death from family tragedy into something far darker. 👇
