Chapter Nineteen
Troy
Eden returned to her trailer after just a couple of minutes, and I jumped to my feet. “Is everything okay? What did she say?”
“It’s fine, Blair isn’t going to tell anyone,” she replied. “But we really do need to be more careful.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I should probably head back to the mansion.”
Eden held up a hand. “Not yet. I just thought of something, and I think I know how we can finally catch our saboteur.”
“Really? That’s great. How?”
“You know how this place used to be used for another reality show?”
“Vaguely. That weird one where they got those city people to live a cowboy sort of lifestyle for months at a time?”
She nodded emphatically. “That’s the one. Well, that was a kind of ‘Big Brother’ type of show, so there were way more cameras hooked up around the place. As in CCTV stuff.”
“Yeah, but they would’ve taken it all down when the show ended, right? Or at least turned them off.”
“A lot of them were taken down, yeah, because we don’t need as much CCTV footage for The Stud. But there are still a few around that were built into light fixtures, so they aren’t all that obvious, and they were never taken down. And most of them are in the dead zones where none of the Stud cameras are.”
I nodded slowly, finally comprehending what she was saying. “So the saboteur might be doing dodgy stuff in the dead zones, thinking she’s safe because she’s been told there’s no cameras around…but there are some still there.”
“Exactly. So if those old cameras are still recording and the footage is still being transmitted and stored somewhere, we might be able to find something helpful. It’s a long shot, but I’m going to find out.”
“How?”
“That old show was on the same network that our show is. I should be able to use that as a starting place.”
Eden grabbed her cell phone and dialed a number, and someone answered a moment later. “Hi, this is Eden Zamora. I’m a junior producer on The Stud. I was just wondering if I could talk to someone in the network IT department for a minute? Sure, I’ll hold.”
She was transferred to the correct department a few seconds later, and she explained the situation to the person on the other end of the line. “So I was just wondering if any of those old cameras are still transmitting videos and being stored somewhere. And if so, can I access them?” she finished.
She nodded and said ‘uh huh’ a few times at what was being said to her for the next minute or so, and then she typed something into a notes program on her laptop. “Thanks. This is really helpful,” she said once she’d finished typing. “Yeah, you have a good day too. Bye!”
“What did they say?” I asked once she was off the phone.
She grinned up at me. “We’re in luck. Some of those cameras are defunct, but some others still work, and any video they transmit goes to an online archive hosted by the network. All I have to do is log in to the network video archives with these credentials the IT guy just gave me, and I should be able to look at the footage from the last couple of months. Hopefully something useful comes up.”
“Want some help? Or should I get out of your hair?”
“You can help if you want. We can go to the main media room in the mansion, and if anyone asks why you’re in there with me, you can just say you got bored and came to ask me questions about the show. I am a producer, after all.”
“I guess being seen together in the media room is far less suspicious than being seen together in your trailer,” I said with a grin. “All right, you go first, and I’ll sneak out of here and meet you in there in about ten minutes?”
“You got it.”
Two hours later, we were in the media room together, watching several days’ worth of footage on a very fast speed so it wouldn’t take forever. So far, we hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, but we were both hoping something would come eventually. A few people had been in and out of the media room since we’d arrived, but no one had questioned us hanging out here together— it looked like Eden was catching up on work, and I was simply hanging out and asking questions.
I knew Eden was feeling guilty and anxious over our secret relationship, and I couldn’t wait for this damn show to be over so I could show the world my true feelings about her. It sucked that we had to hide it for now, but I’d be damned if I let myself be the reason she lost her job. She’d worked so hard to get it, and I knew that she saw it as a good stepping stone kind of job in order to further her career path; she might not want to work on The Stud forever, but the experience would prove valuable and look great on her résumé. I wasn’t going to be the asshole who took that all away from her, so all I could do was wait.
“I have an idea,” I said. “What was the date when we had that big dinner party? After I eliminated the first eight women.”
“You mean when the hummus was poisoned with laxatives and emetics?”
“Yeah.”
“Um…let me think,” she replied, chewing on her lip as she considered the question. “Must’ve been the sixth of March. Why?”
“One of the dead zones where there’s no Stud CCTV cameras is the hallway leading to the main kitchen, right?”
Comprehension dawned on Eden’s face. “Oh! Yes, and we have footage of that hallway now, because some of the old show’s cameras are there. So we can go back to that night and see if there was anyone sneaking around the kitchen.”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
Eden scrolled back in the archives to the right day, and then she fast-forwarded the video to around five o’clock in the evening, when the chefs would’ve started preparing everything.
“Nothing yet,” she murmured as the time-stamp on the screen grew closer to seven o’clock. So far, the only people seen going in and out of the kitchen that night were staff members who had every reason to be there.
“That dinner wasn’t till pretty late. Give it time,” I replied. “Hey, wait….look!”
A new person had just arrived on the screen. Cailin. She was talking to one of the chefs in the hallway, and then the two of them walked into the kitchen together.
“Ha! I knew it,” I said. “What’d I tell you….still waters run deep.”
Eden sighed. “This doesn’t prove anything. Cailin is always going to the chefs and complaining to them about her peanut allergy. I bet she was just talking to him about that and then went into the kitchen with him so he could show her that the food was fine. I’ll ask.”
She paused the video feed and spoke to the kitchen staff on her two-way radio for a moment, and one of the chefs soon confirmed that he had spoken to Cailin that night. He’d let her into the kitchen so she could check out the food (and so he could prove it was all peanut-free for her), and he’d had his eyes on her the entire time. There was no way she would’ve been able to sneak anything into the hummus.
“Damn. So it might not be her. We’re back to square one,” I said, my shoulders slumping.
Eden shook her head. “Not necessarily. We should still finish watching the video feed for that night. Like you said, it was a late dinner.”
She un-paused the kitchen hallway footage, and when the time-stamp read approximately 7:45 P.M., we saw someone else entering the hallway and stepping into the kitchen.
“Oh, shit,” I said, my eyebrows practically shooting to the ceiling. “Is that…”
Eden nodded. “Yep,” she said, her face drawn into a grim expression. “It’s Blair.”