Two agents from the Texas Department of Public Safety stood near the door, having been reached by phone and told, cryptically, to get there fast.
A laptop sat open on Bennett’s desk, a card reader plugged into its side, a single blue light blinking as the files loaded.
“Play it,” Bennett said.
The first video file opened. A timestamp blinked in the corner of the frame: the night of the murder, five years earlier. The footage was grainy but usable — clearly captured by a small aftermarket camera, the kind a nervous business owner hides in a bookshelf when he doesn’t fully trust his own partners.
It showed Nathaniel Reyes at his desk, alone, working late.
The office door opened.
A man stepped into frame, dressed in dark clothing, wearing gloves.
Holloway leaned forward without meaning to. Whitfield stopped breathing entirely.
The man lowered his hood.
It was Victor Calloway.
Nobody in the office said a single word for several long seconds. On the screen, Victor and Reyes began arguing — something about offshore accounts, about wire transfers that were never supposed to exist on paper, about money that had apparently gone somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. As Reyes reached for the phone on his desk, Victor pulled a knife from beneath his coat.
The footage cut away before the worst of what happened next. It didn’t need to show more. What it showed instead was almost harder to watch — Victor, calm now, methodical, moving through the office like a man following a checklist. Wiping down surfaces. Lifting a gold ring from the victim’s hand and dipping it in blood before slipping it into his pocket. Placing Reyes’s personal cell phone into a small metal box.
Then pulling a plastic bag from his coat.
Inside it: a pair of work gloves and a pale sweater — Renee’s sweater, left behind in his car two days earlier after he’d driven her home from a family dinner she barely remembered attending.
The footage showed him carefully wiping the knife handle with the sweater fabric before dropping the weapon into a dumpster two blocks from the building — the same dumpster where investigators would find it three days later and consider their case closed.
One of the DPS agents near the door muttered something under his breath and stepped closer to the screen, as if proximity might somehow change what he was looking at. Holloway said nothing at all. He simply stared, his prosecutor’s instinct for finding holes in a story failing him completely, because there were none left to find.
