Page 34 of Hard Heart

“They, plural?”

“Ruby was a party girl, and she wasn’t ready to settle down, not yet. Let’s leave it at that. Nobody else came into the house—that’s one of the few certainties in this fucked-up fiasco.”

Right. The cameras.

“The trial record mentions CCTV evidence, but the footage isn’t available, and there are a lot of redactions on those pages. Did you see the video?”

“Of course. Back then, we still thought an intruder must have been responsible, but there was only us on the tape. We watched from the last time Ruby walked into the house until the crime scene techs arrived, and nobody else came or went.”

“The cameras covered the whole of the outside?”

“There were two blind spots. One by the tower where a bush had overgrown, and a nook around the back behind the pergola.”

“So someone could have crept in?”

“No, because the tower windows were latched from the inside, and the basement window at the rear was painted shut. It was on our to-do list to fix, but the pond took priority—we wanted to get the liner in before the weather turned any colder.”

“Had you been experiencing problems with intruders? Or trespassers? Any break-ins?”

“Unless you count a spate of religious pamphlets being left on the porch, no.”

“Then why all the cameras? It seemed to be quite a high-tech system, from what I’ve read.”

Sykes rolled his eyes halfway, then caught himself. “Because one of us was both paranoid and tech-obsessed.”

“Are you talking about yourself?”

“Hell, no. I barely knew how the system worked. There was an app on my phone, but I rarely checked it.”

“Then who? Because paranoia isn’t healthy. Maybe⁠—”

“She had nothing to do with Ruby’s death.”

“She? So it was Jerry Knight?”

“We’re getting toward another element that’s off-limits.”

I wanted to push him, but I also knew I had to tread carefully. Sykes was more forthcoming than I’d dared to hope he would be, and I needed to get the basic facts squared away before I began chipping away at his defences.

“Then tell me what you’re comfortable with for now.”

“Her name was never made public because she was too young.”

I sat up straighter. “The unidentified minor?”

“We’ll call her Person A.”

“Did she live there? I assumed she was a visitor.” Or a kidnap victim.

“She was the last to move in, but she’d been there for almost two years. Not everyone was happy about it, but I was the deciding vote, and I understood the compulsion to get away from difficult parents.”

“So she was a runaway? A teen runaway?”

“Dawson found her camped out in a fucking crypt, of all places. She said she was sixteen.”

“Was she sixteen?”

“She looked more like twelve,” he admitted, and I wanted to shake him.