Part 2
Officer Walker ran for the stairs. Grant stayed with us, one hand raised toward Warren. “Let her go.” He released Claire slowly. Derek was already moving toward the elevator. “Stay here,” Grant ordered. The scream had stopped, but a woman upstairs was sobbing. I looked at Claire. “Who’s up there?” “Accounting. Emma works late on Thursdays.” Her gaze dropped to the brass key. “That office has our old incident recorder. It’s scheduled for disposal at eight. They said the hard drive failed. It didn’t.”
I showed Grant the threatening message. She photographed my screen, requested another unit, and told Warren and Derek they needed to remain available while she checked the report. Neither was under arrest. Neither looked inclined to leave. They watched the key. Rachel arrived as Grant escorted Claire and me down the service stairs, with hotel security director Owen Mercer meeting us at the bottom. “Tell me what this opens,” he said. Claire pointed to a dented steel cabinet inside the service office. Owen exhaled. “They told me that recorder was already destroyed.”
The cabinet held a boxy recorder, a monitor, and a yellow disposal tag. Owen checked its connections. “This served the service corridors and back offices before the upgrade. Separate system.” He disconnected its network cable. Rachel photographed the cabinet and called an outside forensic examiner. On the monitor, a paused image showed Derek standing over Lucy. Claire’s eyes filled. “He’s been threatening us in places he thinks don’t have cameras.” “Why didn’t anyone tell Owen?” I asked. Owen answered himself. “Complaints went through Derek. I accepted his summaries.”
Officer Walker radioed Grant. Emma, the accounting clerk, had been locked in the executive records room. She was shaken but uninjured. Someone had pulled the door shut and wedged a chair beneath its outside handle. She had screamed when the lights went out. “And there’s an open safe,” Walker added. “Sloan says cash is missing.” Claire grabbed the desk to steady herself. “My badge.” I opened the photograph again. The badge lay beside the drawer, angled neatly toward the camera. Someone had taken time to compose it.
“I lost it yesterday,” Claire whispered. “Derek issued a replacement.” Rachel asked Grant to preserve the hotel’s access logs. Then Owen found the old recorder’s archive. Yesterday afternoon, Derek had entered the service office holding Claire’s badge. Twenty minutes later, Warren joined him carrying an envelope. The video had no sound. It didn’t need any to explain why Warren had wanted the key. Grant spoke into her radio. “Keep Sloan and Pike separated. We need statements about that badge.” I thought we had finally reached the center of it. Then Claire said, “There’s more.”
She gave Rachel a folded invoice. Three hundred thousand dollars for emergency accessibility renovations. “We never had the work,” she said. “The complaints were about rooms still being inaccessible. Derek made us classify them as guest misunderstandings.” I recognized the vendor: Harbor Restoration. Its invoices appeared in every monthly report I had approved. Rachel searched the company registration on her phone, then turned the screen toward me. Warren’s wife was its listed manager. This wasn’t only a manager hiding complaints. The complaints threatened to expose money paid for work that had never happened.
My stomach turned. “I signed those reports.” “You signed summaries they supplied,” Rachel said. “We’ll establish what you received.” “People asked for help, and my signature helped shut them out.” Nobody tried to soften that. Then Owen’s phone rang. His deputy said Derek had asked to use his office to retrieve his medication. Now the door was locked. Owen pulled up the security system on his phone. The corridor camera showed Derek entering empty-handed. Through the office window, we could see him sitting at Owen’s computer.
We hurried upstairs. Derek opened the door when Owen used his key, then shoved past him toward Claire. “You stole my access card!” He grabbed her lanyard. I caught his forearm as the cord tightened against her neck. Grant separated us and turned him against the wall. Claire stumbled into my arms, coughing. Behind Derek, the computer chimed. A document had just reached the shared incident queue. It bore Owen’s name and accused me of ordering records destroyed. Owen stared at it. “I never wrote that.” Then another notification appeared: the original guest complaint archive had been scheduled for permanent deletion in sixty seconds.
Part 3
“Don’t touch the keyboard,” Rachel said. “Owen, can you stop it through your own account?” He moved to a second workstation outside the office and called the hotel’s technology provider. Grant kept Derek against the wall while Walker returned with Warren. “It’s routine maintenance,” Warren said. Rachel pointed to the screen. “Then you won’t object to preserving it.” Owen verified his identity, explained the emergency, and asked the technician to suspend the automated job. I watched the clock advance. Then the technician said, “Deletion disabled. I’m preserving the account logs.”
