Page 78 of Wrong Mail

“Well, that’s to be expected. You’ve barely slept lately.” He looks at me, worried. "What with the pills and everything else... Mal, you can't keep going like this."

“Like what?”

“Running on fumes.”

Then the other thing rises in him, the thing that's been building since the party, and it comes up as certainty.

“Shit. This has to be him. Chris," he says.

I extend a hand to him. “No. David, wait.”

“No. He threatened us in front of forty people. He's telling everyone I assaulted him. And now our dog's gone and your birds are dead." He's up, moving, too worked up to stay in the chair. "This is a message. This is exactly the ugly, cowardly, drunk thing that man does."

"Julia left with him after the party," I say. "As far as I know they've been together since."

"So he waited for a gap, or he paid one of his gym buddies a hundred dollars to do it. I don't care which." He stops. "A man like that always has a way. He probably laughed when he snapped those birds' necks."

I don't answer. I'm thinking of the folder on my island. Of a sedative in the blood. A room left too clean. Bodies arranged after the fear had already been taken out of them.

Chris could hurt something, I believe that. Chris could smash a window, break a lock, leave blood and feathers all over the grass. But this doesn't feel like rage. It feels planned.

And I know the difference too well.

Then David goes still.

He's got his phone out, thumbing into the security app Henry's crew set up. I watch him scroll, and stop, and scroll again.

“That’s impossible. There's nothing," he says. "The camera on that gate. There's no footage from this morning. There's no footage from last night either." He looks up. "It should all be here. It goes to the cloud. It's supposed to keep even if the power drops."

"There was a power cut," I say. "Half the point went dark."

"Then it should have caught up when the power came back." He's still looking at the phone, at the blank where the footage should be. Something is working in his face that I don't like. "Whoever came through that gate, the camera was pointed right at them. And there's nothing."

He stands there a moment longer. Then he pockets the phone.

"Henry put this system in," he says.

The name lands between us.

"He'll know why it wasn't recording."

"David."

But he's already moving.

"I'm just going to ask him."

Chapter Twenty-Five

David is already halfway up the road by the time I get my shoes on. I go after him in his coat because it's the one by the door. Outside the rain is thin. He isn't running. He's walking the way he walks into a conversation he's decided to have. Fast and level, his phone still in his hand.

"David. Hold up. Slow down. What are you going to say to him?"

"I'm just going to ask him why a system we paid all that money for has no idea who came through my gate today." He doesn't look back.

"Please don't lose your temper. He'll think we're accusing him of something, and it probably was the storm. Half the point lost power."

“The storm didn’t somehow reach into the backup storage and wipe the last two days off the record.” He lifts the phone and shows me his call log. Two recent calls, didn’t connect. "That's their support line. I've rung it twice coming up the road. It goes to a voicemail that's full." He puts it away. "I don’t understand what the hell is happening. He said we could avoid this.”