The Final Alibi

 

Detective Lena Voss had been staring at the photo for ten minutes.

The victim, Raymond Kessler, was smiling in the picture, holding up a champagne glass at a party in 2012 — the same night he was found dead in an alley behind the Grand Royale Hotel. Officially, the case had been closed as an unsolved robbery gone wrong. Unofficially, it had haunted Lena for years.

Now, twelve years later, a witness had come forward.

“I was there that night,” the man said, sitting across from Lena in the interrogation room. “But I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have. I was with Detective Rowan the whole time.”

Detective Rowan.

Lena felt her jaw tighten. Rowan had been her mentor back then — a respected detective who had retired two years after the Kessler case went cold. She remembered how Rowan had insisted they close it quickly, how he’d pushed for the robbery angle despite the lack of stolen valuables.

“Why are you coming forward now?” Lena asked.

The man smiled thinly. “Because Rowan can’t protect you anymore. He’s dead.”

Lena’s pen hovered over her notebook. “Protect me?”

“Protect you from the truth,” the man said. “Kessler wasn’t killed over money. He was silenced. And you’re the only one who can prove why.”

Lena reopened the file that night. She spread every photo, every report, across her kitchen table. The evidence didn’t add up — it never had. Kessler had been a corporate whistleblower set to testify against a powerful pharmaceutical firm. He’d vanished hours before he was due in court.

She pulled Rowan’s notes from the archive. There it was — a single line, hastily written in the margin of the incident report:

“He was never supposed to be found.”

The next day, Lena started digging. She interviewed old witnesses, tracked down retired officers, pieced together a timeline that had been deliberately fractured.

But every step she took, someone seemed to be one step ahead of her. Evidence disappeared. Witnesses recanted. A car tailed her late at night.

And then came the package.

A single photograph.

Rowan, standing over Kessler’s body in the alley, cigarette glowing in the dark.

Lena knew then what she had to do.

She called the witness back in. “You said Rowan was with you the whole night. That’s your alibi.”

The man nodded.

Lena slid the photograph across the table. “Then you just gave Rowan the perfect alibi for murder. Who paid you to do it?”

The man’s smirk faltered for the first time.

“Who,” Lena repeated, “are you really working for?”  Read more free download click here