Sign the Papers Mr. Langford novel Chapter 361

A dead silence fell over the warehouse.

Phoebe scoffed in utter disbelief. "Wow, overwritten right on schedule."

Wren glanced up at the top of the doorframe.

At the far end of the corridor, a camera was mounted squarely facing the row of doors where Unit 3 sat. The outer casing looked ancient, yet it was suspiciously free of dust.

She took a picture of it.

"Is the footage from the last seven days still available?"

Manager Morrison mumbled evasively, "We'll have to check."

"Check it right now."

Manager Morrison's face turned a sickly shade of green.

He clearly hadn't expected Wren to be this relentless, nor did he anticipate that she wouldn't completely unravel at the sight of the empty unit. Her composure was suffocating him.

While the staff hurried off to pull the footage, Phoebe and Wren kept searching the warehouse.

The two tattered cardboard boxes were empty, their bottoms stained with water damage. The snapped wood resembled the side panel of a bookshelf, devoid of any markings. The rusty shelves had three tiers, the bottom one littered with crumpled packing film and shredded paper.

Phoebe slipped on a pair of gloves and began sifting through the scraps piece by piece.

"This place was swept clean," she muttered. "And they were in a rush."

Wren knelt on the opposite side of the shelf.

Shining her phone's flashlight through the slats, she noticed something wedged between the corner of the wall and the metal rack.

It was incredibly thin.

It looked like a photograph.

She didn't touch it. She snapped a photo first, then called Mr. Lawson over.

Mr. Lawson put on his gloves, extracted it delicately with a pair of tweezers, and sealed it in a clear evidence bag.

It was indeed an old photograph.

The edges were yellowed, and the back was coated in a thin layer of grime. The front depicted three people standing in a conference room, with Vivian Vance positioned right in the center.

Wren recognized her instantly.

The Vivian in the picture was much younger than the one in Wren's memories. She wore a crisp white blouse, her hair pulled back into a neat twist, a document clasped in her hands. She wasn't smiling, her gaze fixed sharply on the camera lens—cold and unyielding, a stark contrast to the pale, fragile mother Wren remembered fading away in a hospital bed.

To Vivian's left stood a middle-aged man, his face blown out by the harsh lighting. The figure on her right was reduced to a mere shoulder, as if that side of the photo had been intentionally cropped.

Phoebe whispered, "Is that your mother?"

Wren nodded.

She stared intently at the document in Vivian's hands, her vision blurring with heat before she violently fought the tears back down.

Mr. Lawson flipped the evidence bag over.

There was a line of text scrawled across the back.

The security footage Manager Morrison managed to scrape together was far worse than they had anticipated.

Only three days of footage from the corridor remained.

Everything prior to the day Wren first visited the depot had been completely overwritten. The footage from the day of the alleged patrol was missing a crucial two-hour block. The system logs cited an "unexplained equipment reboot."

Phoebe glared at the incident report, her face freezing over.

"Missing every critical window, yet the paperwork is impeccably neat."

Mr. Lawson packed the documents away.

"The neater it is, the easier it is to investigate. A gap in the record is evidence in itself."

Standing at the entrance of the depot, Wren cast one final glance in the direction of Unit 3.

The iron door had been slammed shut, the new lock clamped back in place, its silver body gleaming coldly in the twilight.

Her phone rang.

Quentin Whitaker.

Wren stared at the caller ID, answered, and hit record.

Quentin's voice was much lower than it had been the night before. "You went to Channing Road?"

"I did."