The Fount of Dragon Fire

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

The surveillance footage that captured the hall leading to Meeting Room 3, and all cameras on the premises, was to be running and recording at all times due to the president's presence. However, when the video was pulled up, everything that had been recorded that day was gone. All traces of it had been wiped from the computer leaving that hall blank for the day.

"It had to have been Dolan." Ash growled, turning away from his laptop screen where he had set it up on the rather impressive desk in their two bed hotel room.

Camry, who had just come from the shower, was readying the blow dryer so she could purge all the water from her hair before it became cold. "Well, he was there, I suppose. And, I guess he had reason since Thad being discovered was why the energy line was stopped. If I lost a few billion dollars, I would be pretty bummed, too."

Ash frowned at his laptop and, when he didn't continue speaking immediately, Camry turned on the blow dryer and began running it across her hair. The heated air felt wonderful as she banished the rapidly cooling water drops.

The relative silence between them brought about by the little machine wasn't quite uncomfortable, but it wasn't really all that easy either. Camry wasn't sure if it was because of finding Thad's body yesterday or just because of everything all together.

Her hand hesitated, pausing in the act of blow drying.

Thad's body made the third dead man that Camry had seen. All in the space of the same month. Each one just as bloody and more fresh than the last.

Yet, how was it that Thad's was the one that was burning most in her brain?

Yarrow Norcross she would have understood. The first body she had ever seen was surely to be something that cemented into her memory. Adler, especially, she would have expected. One of her only friends in the world dead definitely should have haunted her.

But good memories that she had of Adler kept coming to the forefront of her mind. Enough to choke her when she let them bring tears to her eyes. That last moment, lying dead in the streets or being shot off the hood of a car, weren't what stuck with her. And, honestly, she felt no great need to change that fact either.

She wanted to remember Adler as happy and alive. She allowed the image of his dead body to be repressed because it was better to think of the good times. Adler making pancakes. Adler protesting in righteous, excited anger. Adler kissing Silvia so sweetly that it still made Camry's chest tighten in longing for something like that for herself.

That was fine with her. But for the body to stick with her to be Thad's?

Part of her actually felt disappointed. Before she could face him, before she could prove to herself that he had no remaining hold over her, he had died and robbed her of the opportunity. The sight of his body, still slightly warm, sprawled out on the floor was staying with her above the other two so easily.

Preliminary results from the agents investigating his murder seemed to indicate that he had been bludgeoned to death. The side of his face that Camry hadn't seen, according to them, had been beaten inwards. There had been more marks along various points on his body. As though whoever had done it had beaten him savagely.

Whatever weapon had been used hadn't yet been found. The security footage was gone. And there had been no witnesses around to give them any clues.

From what Ash had been able to find out from his friends and contacts in the investigation, Parker's statement was that, when he left him there, Thad had still been alive. Angry and demanding to speak to the president, but alive. Parker said he saw Dolan Law coming out of the elevator on the first floor, but didn't know what happened to him after that.