Page 103 of A Smile Full of Lies
He held up a small black USB drive between his fingers.
“Got something for you.”
I blinked and frowned, confused.
“For me?”
He nodded, crossing to the island.
“If you’re really up for writing the book about my family’s murder like you said… then you need to see this.”
My fingers trembled slightly as I reached for the drive.
“What is it?”
He hesitated for a beat.
“What is it? Maybe useless. But it’s the only thing I’ve got as a starting point. Not that it’s been any use to me, so far. No one else has ever seen it.”
His voice was uneven, and he closed his eyes for a moment, as if whatever was in his thoughts was too much.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s everything I was able to recover from the night my family was killed,” he said quietly. “A security footage fragment. From the one exterior security camera that didn’t get wiped.”
My stomach dropped.
“You’re trusting me with this?” I asked, voice too thin.
Knox’s gaze met mine, steady and unreadable.
“I trust you completely, Ros,” he said.
The declaration was so simple, so damn certain, like it wasn’t the most devastating thing anyone had ever said to me. I swallowed hard and closed my fingers around the drive.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll watch it.”
Knox kissed the top of my head before he left, his hand brushing lightly over my hip like it wasn’t even a choice anymore, like his possessive, intimate touch was just muscle memory now.
The second the front door clicked shut behind him, I exhaled hard, went and grabbed my laptop, and slipped the USB drive into it.
It loaded fast. No sensible name, just a jumble of letters and numbers. It was just a single video, timestamped from the night of the murders. I clicked play.
The footage was grainy, green-tinted night vision footage, and angled just wide enough to capture the long stretch of curved gravel driveway outside Stonewood Manor. The timestamp ticked forward.
A nondescript white work van pulled up to the far edge of the frame. The headlights cut out.
The driver’s side door opened, followed by the others. Four figures stepped into frame; all tall, broad, and built like gym rats.
Suddenly, it was difficult for me to breathe.
They were all wearing industrial blue coveralls. No logos. Generic as hell. Each one had a large, empty duffel bag slung over one shoulder. And each of them wore a full-face Halloween mask, four monsters ambling up the drive toward the house like they were out for a pleasant evening stroll. One was a demonic clown, another was a werewolf, the next wore a ghostface mask, and the last one wore a rubber Bill Clinton mask.
HVAC techs. They looked like HVAC techs out to play some kind of dumb Halloween prank.
My vision blurred and my heart pounded in triple time because I’d seen eerily similar coveralls once before.
It was at a college Halloween party during our freshman year. Thayer and his cousins showed up as a group costume of HVACguys, at least that’s how they’d described it, complete with fake work orders and prop tool belts. They’d been cocky. Loud. Swaggering.
