“Well, hello,” Willow said as the boy strolled in and plopped himself on the end of the bed. “What are you up to?”
His shrug seemed to involve his entire body. “I’m bored.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She went to the diner with Aunt Leni.”
“And where’s . . . everyone else?” Willow hedged.
“I dunno.”
Willow doubted Riley had been left alone in the house, and although she really wanted to ask about Razor, she refused to drag a child into her personal drama.
“Do you wanna play a game?” he asked, swinging his legs up onto the mattress as he opened the computer. He didn’t wait for her to answer. Patting his little hand on the bed, he practically demanded she take a seat next to him.
Willow sat down and watched as the laptop screen woke up. An aerial view image of a tranquil, springtime mountainside filled the monitor. The view was strangely familiar.
The fine hairs at the back of her neck rose as she stared at the picture on the screen.
It was more than familiar. She would know that sloping mountain view anywhere.
“Where did you get this?”
Riley gave another of his full-body shrugs. “It’s some dumb movie where nothing happens.”
“May I have a look?” she asked, taking the laptop from him.
The still was actually a paused video. Some kind of surveillance footage, shot by an apparent drone. She tapped the play button and watched in confusion as the drone hovered high above the Colorado mountainside. When Laurel’s cabin came into the frame, Willow couldn’t hold back her shocked gasp.
“What’s wrong?” Riley asked, peering up at her in concern.
She shook her head, incapable of words as she watched the drone footage of her sister’s cabin. Hour upon hour of overhead surveillance footage, based on the playback timer at the bottom of the video.
“How did you get this, Riley?”
He held up his hands. “Maybe Razor was watching it. It was already open when I took my computer from the den.”
Razor was watching this? Where would he have gotten video footage of Laurel’s cabin?
She minimized the file and realized it was just one of many contained in the opened folder. Dates on the files tracked back well into last year. There had to be several months’ of coverage.
Did they belong to Razor? What the hell was he doing with these?
She opened another video and watched it for a few moments. Then another. And another. Finally, she opened one that showed her Jeep rolling up to the cabin. Willow’s breath seized in her lungs as she watched herself get out of the vehicle carrying a bag of groceries for Laurel.
The drone’s camera zoomed in on her and held, following her every move.
“Hey, is that you?” Riley blurted, pointing at the screen.
Willow could only stare, confusion and a mounting sense of suspicion—of betrayal—rising inside her. What business did Razor have with months of drone footage of that mountain? Had he been watching Laurel? Was he involved with her killers somehow?
That last question seemed totally impossible, given all he’d done to protect Willow. Her mind rejected it almost as swiftly as her heart. Yet even if he wasn’t connected to her twin’s murder, that still didn’t explain why he would have kept his surveillance a secret. Unless he was ashamed for some reason.
Willow watched the way the drone’s camera seemed to tighten on her as she moved. It felt somehow intimate. A violation of her personal space, now that she was viewing the video months after the fact.
A corrosive thought seeped into her thoughts as she watched how obsessively the camera’s eye tracked her. Razor hadn’t known she existed when this video footage was taken. He must have believed she was Laurel all that time.
She opened another video and scrolled forward until she appeared onscreen. Just like before, the camera found her and closed in again, as it had on the previous surveillance footage. As if the drone’s operator couldn’t look away.
