“What a freak,” Amanda said.
“He’s either incredibly security conscious or he’s one of those people obsessed with documenting each and every minute of his life,” Jacob said.
“Well, when you’re sleeping with so many other men’s wives, I guess it’s not a bad idea to have hidden cameras just in case you wind up murdered or something,” Amanda remarked dryly.
“What did you find?” Spenser asked.
“Give me just a moment,” he replied as he typed away at his keyboard.
A moment later, he cast the collection of files he was looking at onto the monitor on the wall. He navigated his cursor to one of the marked videos and Jacob double clicked on it. Inside the file were video clips, each of them marked with the location… kitchen, living room, dining room.
“This is the one that caught my attention,” Jacob said. “I think you’ll like it.”
He hit play and the screen filled with a view of Hamill’s living room. The room was empty, but Spenser heard raised voices. They were muffled, though, as if they were yelling at each other in another room, and she couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Just wait,” Jacob said, as if reading her mind.
A moment later, Hamill stepped into view, his face flustered and tight with anger. He wheeled around just as Layla stepped into the frame. Her eyes narrowed, her lips curled back in a sneer, radiating rage from every pore.
“How could you do that to me, Seth? To us?” she screeched.
“Baby, I didn’t mean to… it just happened,” he said. “You know how much I love you.”
“How many, Seth? How many other whores are you sleeping with?”
“It’s not like that, baby—”
“How many!?”
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I love you—”
The sharp and sudden crack of Layla’s hand meeting Hamill’s face was so unexpected, Spenser jumped slightly. She probably should have expected it was coming—after all, she’d obviously just found out her man was cheating on her. But it had come out of nowhere so fast, it was startling. Hamill’s head snapped to the side and although his face clouded over with anger, he held it in check, perhaps realizing he deserved it. Although Spenser wasn’t sure he was capable of that sort of introspection.
“Okay,” Hamill said. “I deserved that.”
“You’re damn right you did. You deserve more than that!”
“Let’s just calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! You’re cheating on me! Again! After you promised that it would never happen again!”
Hamill cut a side-eyed glance at the camera, as if only just remembering it was there. He slipped something out of his pocket and the feed suddenly went dark.
“What was that?” Spenser asked. “What happened?”
“Probably a remote device he controlled the cameras with,” Jacob answered. “He didn’t want this being filmed, so he cut the feed. But he didn’t think to erase it from the cloud.”
Jacob scrolled the video back to just before Hamill cut the feed and hit pause. Layla’s tear-stained face and expression of pure heartbreak framed perfectly on the screen.
“This was three weeks ago,” he said.
“So, she lied to me about knowing he’d been cheating on her.”
“Sounds like it,” Amanda chimed in.
Layla’s face glowed red and the agony in her expression was so poignant, even knowing the woman was a killer, Spenser’s heart still hurt for her. In that moment, she could see that Layla’s heart was shattering into a million pieces, betrayed by the person who meant the most to her in the entire world.
Spenser could see that Layla was hurting. The woman’s grief, at least in part, was very real. But she had also seen that sense of betrayal etched so plainly into her face on that video.
“But wait, there’s more,” Jacob said.
He closed the video clips folder then opened a second one that looked like it contained a record of text messages. Jacob navigated to the chain in question and called it up. Spenser read the long, angry chain of texts from Layla to Hamill that had come in after learning he’d been cheating on her. Each message was angrier than the last, culminating in a text she’d sent just a week before he died on stage at the festival.
“You’re going to pay for breaking my heart,” Spenser read Layla’s words. “I am going to make you suffer, Seth. You are going to be sorry for hurting me if it’s the last thing I do. And I promise it will be the last thing you do.”
“That’s it. That’s our smoking gun,” Amanda said enthusiastically. “That’s enough to get us a warrant to search her place, which puts what you found back into play.”
Spenser shook her head. “It’s not. It’s suggestive, but it’s not a smoking gun.”
“What are you talking about? She threatened to kill him,” Amanda said.
“Did she?” Spenser asked. “Where do you see that in her words?”
Amanda looked confused. “But we know—”
“We suspect. We’re ninety-nine percent sure. But like I keep saying, there’s a universe of difference between knowing something and being able to prove it,” Spenser cut her off. “What we have right now is suggestive, sure. But I doubt a judge would ever sign off on a warrant with what we have. Not without some serious arm twisting. We need more. Something definitive.”
“Like what?” she asked.
