Chapter 9 - CAMERA FOUR
The backup wasn't digital.
That saved it.
My father had paid for an independent tape recorder connected to Camera Four.
Old technology.
Ugly.
Reliable.
The tapes had been stored in a climate-controlled archive beneath Daniel Mercer's former workshop.
Tessa found the box after midnight.
Eleven recordings.
The night my father died was number seven.
We watched it on a borrowed player.
At 8:42 p.m., my father walked outside.
At 8:47, another car arrived.
Elaine Mercer stepped out.
Tessa stopped breathing.
Elaine and my father argued beside the driveway.
No sound.
At 9:03, a second man arrived.
Younger.
Dark hair.
My father shook his hand.
I leaned closer.
I knew that face.
Dominic's father.
Salvatore Moretti.
He had served my family for thirty years.
He died when Dominic and I were twenty-eight.
On the tape, Salvatore opened my father's car hood.
Elaine watched.
My father had gone back inside.
Salvatore reached into the engine compartment.
Ten minutes later, both visitors left.
The following morning, my father crashed.
Tessa whispered, “Dominic's father killed yours.”
“Looks that way.”
My stomach twisted.
Dominic and I had grown up together.
Shared meals.
School fights.
Funerals.
Had he known?
The answer arrived sooner than I wanted.
My security chief called.
One of Dominic's accountants had surrendered to federal investigators.
He provided records showing Dominic had been paying Elaine for years.
Not months.
Years.
Then came another message.
A photograph.
Dominic standing beside Salvatore in a private hospital room.
Date stamped fourteen years earlier.
Salvatore had supposedly been dead for fourteen years.
But in the photograph, he was alive.
I called the investigator.
“Where was this taken?”
“Switzerland.”
I stared at the image.
Dominic's father hadn't died.
His funeral had been staged.
May you like
His grave was empty.
And according to international travel records, the man had returned to the United States three weeks before I was shot.
