Chapter 3

At 10:30 p.m., I was back in my apartment.

I pulled the audio I'd recorded at the police station into my editing software. The quality was terrible—phone-to-air, compressed twice over. But it was enough to tell me one thing: what Ryan played wasn't the original capture.

It was a flattened, mixed-down track.

A wedding like the Hernandez ceremony doesn't run on a single microphone. The emcee's lapel. The groom's chest mic. Ambient crowd mics. Camera audio. At least four separate feeds.

Ryan had one track. Mixed.

That meant someone had pulled the original recordings first, cut out twelve seconds, then handed the edited file to the police.

I started scrolling through Hernandez wedding videos online.

The internet had already exploded.

"Billionaire Heiress Falls to Her Death at Wedding."

"Temp Worker Suspected of Theft."

"Bride Argued with Catering Staff Moments Before Fall."

I ignored the headlines. I looked at the corners of the frames. The equipment table offstage. The camera positions. The tiny silver mic clipped to the groom's tie. And the watermark flickering in the bottom right corner of the big screen feed.

Vow Frame Studio.

I found their website and called.

"Hi. I need to know if you still have the original multi-track audio from last night's Hernandez wedding."

Two seconds of silence. Then the line went dead.

I stared at the dark screen.

Good. I was in the right place.

The next morning, I walked into the Vow Frame Studio storefront.

The owner's name was Paxton. Mid-forties, bloodshot eyes, the kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from one bad night.

He saw me and said, "Ms. Perez, I can't help you."

"I haven't even asked for anything yet."

"The Hernandez family. Anyone who touches that story gets burned."

I sat down. "My brother is already burned."

Paxton didn't answer.

I said, "The police have an edited, single-track recording. You had multi-track audio last night. Right?"

He looked at me for a long time. Then he lowered his voice. "In theory."

"In theory?"

"Last night we had several devices running. Which ones kept the full cache… I don't know."

"Where are the devices now?"

His face went paler. "Sealed."

"By who?"

"Ryder. Head of hotel security."

The door pushed open. Footsteps.

Ryder walked in.