Page 90 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“Do not fault Christa for trying to do the right thing with minimal damage,” our sister says. “I trust her and Spike on this. I really do.”

“Something happened,” I reply. “She tried to hide it, but we know she was here last night. We have a lead.”

I get River out of his seat and take his place so I can log into my security account from his computer and tap into the Hawthorne CCTV system.

“We need to track her movements through the building,” River says.

“I’m already on it.”

Teagan sighs loudly. “Christa said she was going to use cloned credentials to move through the building, that she was going to be careful about the cameras. It was all meant to protect you guys from the potential legal fallout.”

“But she was in her office. And judging by the activity records from last night, the camera in her office wasn’t disabled,” I mutter, going over the logs before I pull up the footage in a separate window. “Here she is…”

“What about Spike?” Cassius asks. “Have you heard from him since last night?”

She shakes her head. “He left a text on our group chat, I think,” she adds and takes her phone out, checking her messages. “Yeah… He left a… I don’t get it.”

“What?” River replies, inching closer so he can see her screen. I notice his frown deepen. “It’s a string of letters, numbers and symbols. It doesn’t make sense…”

“Hold on, I found her,” I say, prompting my siblings to gather behind me while we comb through the security footage. We see Christa coming into her office. I hit the fast-forward button all the way up to the point where she’s about to leave.

Teagan gasps. “What the…”

The office door opens, and in walks Alexandra Jones.

“What the shit?” I gasp.

“She said she hadn’t heard from Christa since yesterday,” River mutters.

“Is that a gun?” Cassius points at the screen.

I pause the video for a few seconds and zoom in to confirm. “It’s a gun,” I say, then hit play again. We watch as Alexandra takes Christa out of her office at gunpoint. But as I try to follow them through the building, the image turns grainy. “This isn’t right…”

“What is it?” River asks.

“Someone tampered with the security footage,” I conclude, going over the activity logs again. “Someone edited out some footage.”

“But not the sequence from Christa’s office,” River says.

“Knowing Christa… she must’ve… hold on,” I reply and open another activity log linked directly to her servers. I would need an expert’s eye on this, but at a glance, I think I know what Christa did. “She tapped into her office camera and rerouted the footage recording on a mirror drive. That way, if anybody ever tampered with the Hawthorne CCTV, whatever went on in her office would be saved separately.”

“So, if someone wanted to alter the CCTV footage to keep us from finding something out… like Alexandra probably did,” River says, “we’d have Christa’s office camera to rely on.”

“Christa was always a tad more paranoid in matters of surveillance,” Cassius concedes. “In hindsight, it may just be that quirk of hers that might save her.”

“Might, if we find her in time,” I groan and run a hand through my hair. “Goddammit, Christa.”

River takes a deep breath and a step back. “Can we find Alexandra and Christa anywhere else in that footage, Nate?”

“No.”

“Okay. So, Alexandra Jones is involved somehow. We need to figure out what she wants,” River says. “I think we need to look into her again. Her profile, her company, her financials.”

“I think we also need to bring in the police,” Cassius adds. “It’s time.”

Teagan gives me a terrified look. “That will blow the whole thing wide open. It will give the Mancinis time to cover their asses. The whole point was to hit them before they could see it coming. They thought they had Christa cornered—”

“We need Christa to survive,” I remind her. “Everything else will work out, one way or another. But we have to find her. We need a plan.”

---