Chapter 5 - The Room Behind the Wine Cellar
The hidden access point was discovered at 6:18 Thursday evening.
One of the security technicians noticed an intermittent sensor failure near the wine cellar.
Behind a shelving unit was a maintenance corridor I hadn't entered in years.
Trevor knew about it.
At the end of the corridor, police found a backpack.
Inside:
Gloves.
A burner phone.
Copies of my schedules.
Photographs of my vehicle.
A forged power-of-attorney document.
And the missing encrypted drive.
Trevor had hidden everything before leaving for Vegas.
Which meant his escape wasn't really an escape.
He planned to return.
Police replaced the backpack and installed surveillance.
At 11:37 p.m., a motion sensor activated.
Three minutes before the time in Trevor's notebook.
A figure entered through the maintenance corridor.
Black jacket.
Baseball cap.
Gloves.
Hailey watched from a secured room with me.
She whispered:
"That's him."
Trevor moved through the darkness like a man entering his own house.
Except it wasn't his anymore.
Officers waited.
He reached the wine cellar.
Opened the hidden compartment.
Saw the backpack.
Then every light came on.
"Trevor Whitmore! Sheriff's Department! Hands where we can see them!"
He froze.
For one second, nobody moved.
Then Trevor ran.
He made it twelve feet.
Officers tackled him in the corridor.
I watched through the security monitor as the man who had spent four years calling himself the head of our household lay facedown on concrete with his hands cuffed behind him.
But even then, Trevor smiled.
And when Ruiz asked why, he said:
"You think I'm the one Claire should be worried about?"
The smile vanished from my face.
Because Trevor wasn't working alone.
May you like
And the person who had helped him was someone who still had unrestricted access to my company.
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