Caleb rewound the footage and watched it again, frame by frame, searching for any detail that might give her away.
Height. Build. The way she moved.
Nothing definitive.
It could be anyone—Millie, Valentina.
Not Naomi. His sister wouldn’t do something like this.
Probably not Sissy.
He looked again.
Or maybe it could be. The coat wasn’t buttoned, so he couldn’t really see the stomach area.
But really all he had were guesses.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb finally said. “But I can’t tell who it is.”
The sheriff nodded, his expression unreadable. “She didn’t want to be identified. That much is clear.”
Caleb’s mind raced, pieces clicking together too fast, too sharp.
What about the alarm? If someone left, they should have been notified.
His gaze snapped to Naomi. “The alarm should have alerted us when that door opened.”
Naomi nodded, her face pale. “I know.”
“Did it?” he pressed.
She shook her head slowly. “No. I checked the logs. There’s no record of the alarm going off last night. At all.”
Caleb’s stomach dropped. “Which means someone turned it off. Someone who knew the code.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and undeniable.
Caleb straightened, his chest tight, his thoughts spiraling.
Only a handful of people had access to that code. Him. Naomi. Max. His mom.
And the guests.
Millie. Valentina. Sissy.
His mind immediately went to Millie’s words from earlier, the suspicion she’d voiced so carefully.She seems familiar.
Valentina.
She’d arrived at an odd time, with a story that checked out on paper but felt thin in practice. She’d been polite. Cooperative. Exactly what someone would be if they wanted to blend in.
But what if she wasn’t here for safety?
What if she was here for something else entirely?
Caleb’s jaw tightened, the implications settling over him like ice.
If Valentina had turned off the alarm, if she’d slipped outside in the middle of the night and walked toward the woods where a man now lay dead?—
