Blood for my Rose |• Crimson Rose series✔️

Chapter 19

America
Arizona
Lake Havasu City.

In times of trepidation, they say time moves at snails pace. But the past week flew by in a blur with the same routine of drinking, smoking, sobering up, thinking about Rose and then the cycle began again.

He was getting miserable and insane. They say time heals all wound, perhaps one week was too small to conclude, because if it wasn't, then the person who made that saying knew nothing about grief.

Riley sat on the chair in the hotel he'd been living in for a week now. He was lazily going through his work mails, reading his colleagues express their condolences in multiple emails. He didn't read them, he just scrolled down and back up as he was binge drinking.

He pushed it aside to pick up his ringing phone and saw it was Detective McCall. Then he put it on speakerphone. "Detective."

"Greyson," McCall said on the other end of the call. "We have no evidence whatsoever that proves it was burglary gone wrong. She wasn't raped..."

Riley drifted as an unexpected email popped on the screen. It was from 'Watch Dog Surveillance Company'. The content of the email got him off his back as he leaned forward to finalize reading it. The sender wanted to know how Riley had been enjoying the system he installed, because it was protocol to get customers' feedback.

Then it clicked.

There was a surveillance camera in his apartment that was installed the same day Rose was killed. He'd gotten drowned in anguish to remember this vital piece that could prove who did this and why.

"Are you still there?" McCall asked.

Riley didn't care so much for his information anymore. It was the same thing McCall had called to tell him all week with a different pattern of saying that the case was without evidence so no one could be persecuted yet.

"I have to go, McCall," Riley said and hung up, flying off his seat to pack his things up. He wore a shirt, poured the last content of his glass in his mouth and grabbed both house and car keys. Then he locked up and drove down to his apartment.

The house still smelled of stale blood and a mixture of cigarettes. It looked pretty much deserted, but Riley thought little while he began the search, turning the apartment upside down to know where Rose might have kept device. It took him a total of eleven minutes to finally find it in one of the kitchen cabinets. It was in its carton, and almost out of battery. So he plugged it and went to the app, taking it to the last time movement was detected; the last night it all happened. He started the video from the beginning of the day.

Apprehensively, he watched the man in mask walk out of the jacket cupboard and move to the room—which had no cctv cameras. Then he came back out after about eighteen minutes, and he was without a mask.

Riley zoomed in on the guy but he didn't look recognizable to him. Then he watched the intruder leave.

The location of the camera wasn't strategic enough to pick the location of the entrance doors. It had a very small space it captured. The route between the beginning of the lobby and a few more steps away from the room door. That was all he had. Not what the man in mask had done, but the face of this man. And he picked up the tablet.

McCall would have been the best person to call, had it been he'd not already been giving Riley feedback he didn't want to hear. Riley also knew this type of attack. Unlike what Rose and her family thought about him, he was very familiar with the mafia and knew this could only be an attack on them. Everything began to fall in place. He remembered the collectors book he'd opened at the office on that day. And he calculated the timing to that of Rose's death report. There was like five hours frame for this man to have planned whatever he wanted and executed it perfectly.