Page 76 of Healing Hearts
If there’s one place I never want to go again in my life, it’s here, the police station. Everything about it sends chills down my spine, and now, knowing they’ve pinned something on Judy and have questions about my business, I have no idea what exactly I’m walking into.
“We should talk,” Thomas says, greeting me when I walk in the door. We duck into an empty room reserved for lawyers and their clients, and he shuts the door behind him.
I don’t sit down, preferring to stand, and Thomas leans against the wall too.
“What do they think they have?” I ask.
“You installed security cameras in your office and around the shop, correct?”
“Yeah, after the break-in.”
“That probably saved you from Judy dealing there. One of the people associated with Dan admitted he broke into the shop. The purpose of the break-in is a bit hazy, but I don’t think they anticipated you responding with so many cameras.” He lets out a little chuckle.
None of this is funny to me.
“So, great—the cameras saved me. Why am I here?”
“There are several hours, and sometimes whole days, that are deleted from the security footage archive. A few times where it appears you turnedoffthe cameras in your office. They can’t pin anything on you, but they want those holes filled in. Judy hasn’t implicated you, but Dan keeps trying to say you were part of it. Judy hasn’t really said definitively either way.”
The deleted footage. My stomach drops when I realize what footage I deleted.Fuck. I even called the company and made sure any cached files were also deleted. There was no way I was leaving Emily exposed.
“They need me to confirm why I did that?” I ask. As long as it’s what and not who, I can take the heat for that.
“A logical explanation, yes.”
“I have one,” I say.
“Do you want to tell me now? Will it create more complications?”
“I doubt it,” I say.
“Alright,” Thomas says. “Let’s go explain it to them so we can get all this cleared up.”
In the small room next door, we sit and wait until two officers enter. They sit across from us, and then they slide a piece of paper to me. On the paper are dates and times when the security in the office was turned off or deleted.
“We’re hesitant to believe you’re involved in all this, Trent, but this missing information is a giant question mark. You could have been doing anything in the office.”
I want to ask whether they traced who entered my shop on those days and nights, but I really want to leave Emily out of this—any of this. Besides, that doesn’t account for the times I deleted whole days instead of just isolating the timeframe she was in the office. My laziness has consequences.
“I had a woman in the office, and we were doing things I would rather not have recorded.”
The two officers exchange glances and the older one says, “We’ll need the name of the woman or women to confirm dates and timeframes.”
“Why would you delete a whole day?” the other officer asks.
“Laziness. To delete a specific section, you have to watch it back, isolate the timeframe, and then delete that specific section. Then you have to go into the deleted files and delete it there.”
“But you also called the company and had them delete any version saved on their backend.”
“Right. Privacy is an illusion when it comes to a digital footprint, right? I did the best I could to make sure the woman I was with wouldn’t suffer any embarrassing consequences.”
“We’ll just verify this with her,” the older man says again. “Name and contact?”
“I’m not giving that out,” I say.
Thomas glares at me from the side. I can feel it penetrating my head.
“You understand that we can’t close this until we verify that the missing footage isn’t somehow connected to the drug ring—some elements of which Dan Ramouli is trying very hard to pin on you.”
