Page 83 of Sunburned

“Dinner will be served on the deck of the game room at seven, which is in thirty minutes,” the captain said. “You can ring me or the kitchen if you need anything before that.”

Nods all around as he took leave of us and disappeared through the crew door.

I caught Laurent’s eye and nodded toward the balcony.

He rose and I followed, joining him by the railing where we’d stood earlier this afternoon before we knew the turn the day would take.

“You have friends on the crew?” I asked, gazing out over the luminescent water toward the boats bobbing on the horizon.

He nodded. “Some.”

“I need to get into the security room so I can tap into the cameras.”

“Why?”

Because while I realized I should probably let the police do their job, I’d seen them fail enough in my line of work that I couldn’t trust them to do that. What if they got it wrong, and Samira went to jail when Allison had done it? Or Cody went to jail when Samira had done it? Or what if they started digging into our past and decidedIwas to blame? I couldn’t let that happen.

“Because we’re on that suspect list,” I said. “And I have the best chance of anyone of finding out who did this.”

He nodded. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter 29

Ten minutes later, I was in front of a bank of computer screens in the windowless security room belowdecks, staring at a grid of camera feeds throughout the boat.

Marielle glanced into the hallway as she shut the door behind us and came to stand behind me, next to Laurent. “There’s another page,” she said, pointing to the arrows at the bottom of the page.

I thanked her, but I was after more than a glimpse of the camera feeds. I needed to link them to my computer so that I could access them remotely whenever I wanted, and that required getting into the operating system, which I was pretty sure Marielle was not going to be comfortable with. Which meant I needed to get rid of her.

“This may take a minute,” I said, clicking into the settings of the page.

She checked her watch, nervous. “How long? I have to serve dinner in fifteen minutes.”

“It won’t take longer than that,” I promised. “Why don’t you go ahead?”

“I don’t know,” she said, uneasy. “I’m not supposed to—”

“You’re doing us a big favor,” I said, buttering her up. “We don’twant to get you in trouble. If you’re not here, it won’t be your ass on the line if anyone catches us.”

“Right.” She looked over my shoulder at the bank of cameras. “Unless they check the tape and see me letting you in here.”

“Watch this,” I said, clicking into the video. I snipped out the footage of us entering the security room and patched it with a clip of the static feed of the empty hallway so that the time stamp didn’t jump. “See? We were never here.”

“Oh, you’re good,” she said, impressed.

“It’s really not that hard,” I demurred, throwing her a smile.

She shook her head. “I can hardly do a Zoom call.”

I laughed, hoping my friendliness was having the intended effect. “Well, I bet you know your way around a yacht a lot better than Ido.”

She nodded, looking from Laurent to me. “We won’t mess anything up, we promise,” Laurent swore.

“Okay,” she said. “If anyone comes, the door was unlocked.”

“I’ll snip your exit too,” I offered.

She nodded. “I’ll see you at dinner in fifteen.”

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