A reported lost fob was deactivated in the system. A deactivated fob could not open a door. That was how building security worked, and it was reliable, and it was also the kind of system that a person who co-owned a building and had significant influence over its administrative processes might know how to work around.
She requested the raw access log from the building’s security company — not the formatted summary, the raw file. It took four days and a formal request and some patience that her captain did not share, but it came.
The raw file showed something the formatted summary had not. At eight fifty-one p.m. — fourteen minutes before the coroner’s window for Thomas Aldric’s death — a fob had been presented at the service entrance on the east side of the building. The door had not opened. The fob ID matched the one reported lost two years earlier.
A deactivated fob, used at the service entrance, eleven minutes before a man died in the building it couldn’t open.
Someone had tried.
Sera pulled the fundraiser’s event footage through the venue’s security liaison. She was looking for timestamps — not whether Crane was there, which forty witnesses had confirmed, but exactly when and where. The photograph with the mayor was at nine forty-seven. The footage showed Crane on the main floor from eight thirty through to eleven. He had not left the venue.
He had not needed to.
She sat at her desk and worked it through. Crane had tried the service entrance fob at eight fifty-one and been denied — which meant he had been at the building, which meant the forty witnesses and the mayor photograph were a construction, not a coincidence. Which meant the alibi had been built specifically to accommodate a timeline in which he needed to be somewhere else.
But if the deactivated fob hadn’t worked, he hadn’t got in. And if he hadn’t got in, he hadn’t been in the room. The access log showed no entry. The forensics showed no presence. A man who hadn’t been inside a building could not have caused the death of a man who was.
She went back to the window.
Three inches open. January. Minus four. A thermostat set to twenty-two.
She requested the building’s HVAC records — the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. It was the kind of request that needed explanation and took time, and she gave the explanation and spent the time, and on the seventh day after filing and two days after her captain told her directly to move on to active caseload, the records came back.
The HVAC system for the private office suite had been remotely adjusted at eight fifty-three p.m. The ventilation setting had been changed from standard circulation to external draw — pulling air from outside directly into the office space. The setting had been held for twelve minutes, then returned to standard. The adjustment had been made through the building’s management platform, from an account registered to a maintenance contractor.
The maintenance contractor had not worked in the building for fourteen months.
Their account, which should have been deactivated, had been accessed from an IP address Sera traced to a commercial VPN service. The VPN logs, obtained through a warrant her captain signed with visible reluctance, showed the access had originated from a mobile device registered to Victor Crane.
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