Chapter 4: The Security Footage Gap
Arthur vanished down the dark hallway as silently as he had arrived, leaving the burner phone resting on the dusty floorboards like a ticking bomb. I picked it up, my thumb tracing its plastic casing before slipping it deep into the front pocket of my damp apron. The warning about the security logs echoed in my ears. If the pool camera footage had been wiped, it meant someone with master administrative credentials—someone like Victoria or the head of estate security—had deliberately destroyed the digital evidence before the police could be called. They weren't just trying to fire me; they were building an airtight case of criminal negligence to ensure I never worked in this county again.
I couldn't wait until morning to be escorted off the property like a common thief. Using the screwdriver I had salvaged from the door latch, I finished removing the brass plate, allowing the heavy oak door to swing open with a minimal groan into the dark service corridor. The Sterling estate at four in the morning was a labyrinth of silent shadows, smelling faintly of expensive floor wax and old dust. I kept to the shadows near the wainscoting, my bare feet making no sound on the runner rugs as I navigated toward the basement server room. The mansion was so vast that it felt like an ancient cathedral designed to swallow secrets whole.
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When I reached the heavy metal door of the IT and security hub, I found it unlocked—a careless oversight born of arrogance, or perhaps someone had just left in a hurry after purging the files. I slipped inside, the hum of mainframe towers washing over me in a cold, blue-lit wave. The main desktop monitor was glowing in sleep mode. I tapped the spacebar, and the screen flickered to life, demanding a supervisor login. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I remembered the IT technician, a nervous young man named Leo, writing his backup password on a sticky note under the desk six months ago when he fixed my station's printer. I dropped to my knees, blindly feeling beneath the curved edge of the laminate desk until my fingertips brushed a crinkly square of paper.
I typed the sequence into the prompt. The screen flashed green, granting me full administrative access. My heart skipped a beat as I navigated to the surveillance archive, pulling up the folder for the East Pool cameras. The directory for last night between 10:00 PM and 10:15 PM wasn't just empty; the entire system log had been overwritten with a loop of static. Someone hadn't just deleted the file; they had executed a deep-wipe command using a terminal outside the house. As I scrolled through the metadata, looking for any trace of the original file, a timestamp caught my eye—an export command executed at 10:12 PM, just three minutes after the rescue, originating from the master suite upstairs. Victoria's private dressing room.
