“Then start with him,” I said.
She looked at me steadily. “We’re starting with everyone who had access to that house that morning. That includes him. It also includes people you haven’t thought of yet.”
I didn’t understand what she meant until three weeks later.
Terrence’s alibi, once detectives pulled it apart, turned out to be exactly what it appeared to be. Badge swipe records from the Caldwell Construction site office placed him thirty-eight miles away at 8:14 a.m., the approximate time the medical examiner now estimated as Layla’s time of death based on a more thorough secondary review. Three coworkers confirmed he’d been in a site walkthrough until well past nine.
It was infuriating to hear. I wanted the case against him to be airtight. Instead, detectives kept circling back to something else — a Ring doorbell clip from a neighbor two houses down, posted originally in a Piney Ridge community Facebook group weeks before the funeral, back when it was just neighborhood chatter about “some car parked funny that morning.” A dark sedan, partially visible, idling near the Boone driveway around 7:50 a.m.
Detective Ashford requested the full, unedited footage directly from the neighbor’s cloud storage account. It took another two weeks and a subpoena to the Boones’ own home security provider — because it turned out their indoor camera, the one mounted above the staircase that Terrence had told the first responding officers “wasn’t working that day,” had never actually stopped recording. It had simply stopped syncing to the app on his phone due to a router issue, while the footage itself kept quietly uploading to a separate cloud backup neither Terrence nor, frankly, most people, would have thought to check.
