Chapter 4 - The Security Footage
I couldn't just leave. Not after that threat.
While Mara slept under the heavy influence of sedatives, I left the hospital and took a cab straight back to the Solara Grand. The resort was eerily quiet. Half the guests had checked out in a panic, and the pool area was completely sealed off with yellow police tape and opaque black tarps.
I didn't go to our room. I went straight to the basement, navigating the labyrinth of service corridors until I found the door marked Seguridad.
I knocked twice, pushed the door open, and slipped a crisp hundred-dollar bill into my palm. The security guard, a young kid in a uniform that was a size too big, looked up from his bank of monitors, startled.
"Señor, you cannot be down here—"
"I need to see the pool cameras from 2:00 PM today," I said, dropping the hundred-dollar bill on his keyboard. "Just give me five minutes. Please. My wife was the one under the glass."
The kid looked at the money, then up at me. He had heard about the pregnant woman. Sympathy won out over protocol. He quickly pocketed the cash and started typing.
"The police already took a copy of the hard drive," he whispered nervously. "But I have the raw feed here. What time?"
"2:14 PM."
He pulled up a grid of four cameras. The top-left screen showed the pool deck. The resolution was crisp. I leaned in, my heart hammering in my chest.
There we were. I saw myself holding the towels. I saw Mara standing by the teak lounge chair, smiling, rubbing her stomach.
"Pause it," I commanded.
He froze the frame.
I pointed to the edge of the screen, near a cluster of potted palm trees. "Zoom in right there."
The kid clicked his mouse, expanding the frame.
My breath caught in my throat.
There she was. The little girl in the faded yellow dress. She wasn't a hallucination. She was real, captured in high-definition digital video. But the way she moved... it was chilling.
"Play it forward, slowly," I whispered.
On the screen, the girl didn't walk; she seemed to glide out from behind the palm trees. No one else on the crowded deck paid her any attention. It was as if she were completely invisible to everyone but Mara.
She walked right up to my wife. She looked up at the ceiling. And then, she shoved Mara hard in the chest, sending her tumbling backward into the water.
"Dios mío," the security guard breathed.
"Now," I said, my voice trembling, "switch to the camera on the roof. The maintenance camera overlooking the skylight."
The guard hesitated, then switched feeds.
The screen showed the glass dome of the pool atrium from the outside. The timestamp was exactly 2:13 PM—one minute before the collapse.
A figure was crouching on the metal struts of the skylight. They were dressed entirely in black, wearing a ski mask. They were using some kind of heavy, pneumatic tool, drilling directly into the primary load-bearing joints of the glass frame.
It wasn't an accident. It was a targeted demolition.
"Who is that?" I asked, my blood running cold.
"I don't know," the guard said, trembling. "But look."
The figure in black finished their work, stood up, and looked down through the glass, directly at where Mara was standing. Then, they turned to run.
But as the figure turned, they slipped. Their foot caught on a wire, and their ski mask snagged on a jagged piece of metal, tearing halfway off their face.
For one single, clear frame, the camera caught a profile of the saboteur.
It was Arthur Sterling. The corporate fixer who had just offered me two and a half million dollars.
"Print that frame," I told the guard, my voice deadly calm.
Suddenly, the monitors went black.
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The power to the security room had been cut. The heavy steel door behind me slammed shut, the electronic lock engaging with a sickening click. We were trapped in the dark.
And from the other side of the door, I heard footsteps approaching.
