Chapter 5 - THE POLICE STATEMENT WRITTEN EARLY
Ava spent the morning in Naomi’s office wearing borrowed clothes.
Her bruises looked darker under fluorescent light.
Naomi photographed them.
“Do you have older pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“My cloud account.”
Ryan had changed the password.
Of course.
Bennett Urban’s IT director, Marcus Bell, helped recover access.
They found photographs from six months.
Wrist.
Shoulder.
Upper arm.
A cracked bathroom frame.
A bedroom door without hinges.
Then Marcus noticed something else.
Ryan’s home-security account synchronized to Bennett Urban’s enterprise cloud because Ryan tested building systems from the penthouse.
That was sloppy.
Not stupid.
Convenient systems create traces.
Marcus opened camera logs.
At 10:31 p.m., Ryan disabled hallway continuous recording.
At 10:43, he enabled kitchen event recording.
At 10:45, the countdown began.
Ava stared.
“He selected the ending.”
Marcus nodded.
Then:
“There’s more.”
Ryan’s phone automatically backed up documents.
One file:
Statement_Draft.docx.
Created:
9:58 p.m.
Forty-seven minutes before Ava picked up the poker.
Naomi opened it.
My wife became increasingly agitated tonight. I attempted to create distance. She pursued me into the kitchen and threatened me with a metal fireplace tool.
Ava stopped reading.
“He wrote it before it happened.”
Naomi’s eyes hardened.
“Now we have premeditation.”
“Of what?”
“Of the narrative.”
Not necessarily assault.
Not yet.
Then Ava saw a sentence farther down.
Because of her instability, I believe she should be separated from company decisions until medically evaluated.
There.
The board.
The deal.
The countdown.
All one plan.
But Naomi did not celebrate.
“Ryan will say he drafted a statement because you threatened him earlier.”
“I didn’t.”
“Can you prove it?”
Ava looked at the metadata.
“Not yet.”
Then Marcus found a deleted calendar entry on Ryan’s account.
9:30 P.M. — TEST WINDOW.
Attendees:
Ryan Carter.
Derek Shaw — Northstar Partners.
Ava stared.
May you like
Derek had been in their apartment building that night.
And nobody had mentioned it.
