Chapter 7
“Documentation first,” she said. “Personality after food.”
She handed me a sandwich.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither are collapse victims until they wake on the floor.”
I ate half.
Marisol sat beside Lorenzo.
“Tell me the shooting.”
He described the office.
The missing Brooklyn shipment.
The route known to four people.
Marco’s trembling hand.
The small earpiece concealed beneath his hair.
Then the voice Lorenzo heard before Marco fired.
Pull the trigger, sweetheart.
“Whose voice?” Marisol asked.
Lorenzo’s eyes closed.
“Victoria.”
The room became quiet.
His fiancée.
The woman rehearsing his grief upstairs.
“Are you certain?” I asked.
“I have heard her speak beside me for six years.”
“Intimacy is not admissibility,” Marisol said. “We need the device, communications, financial motive, or Marco.”
“What about the office recording system?” Lorenzo asked.
Vincent answered from the doorway.
“Erased between eleven forty and midnight.”
“Backup?”
“Local backup destroyed.”
“Offsite?”
“The account credentials were changed two weeks ago.”
“By whom?”
“Marco’s security authorization.”
Lorenzo looked toward the stone ceiling.
Betrayal does not always make noise.
Sometimes it changes a password.
Marisol wrote the timeline.
“Why would Victoria do this?”
Lorenzo answered slowly.
“The Brooklyn dock agreement would consolidate the Duca freight companies into one holding structure.”
“Controlled by?”
“Me until marriage. Joint voting rights afterward.”
“Prenup?”
“Not signed.”
“Then she needed you dead before the agreement closed or married after it did.”
“Unless Marco was promised control.”
“Probably both.”
Marisol tapped her pen.
“We do not have enough.”
“I know.”
“We do not confront.”
“I know.”
“We do not send men to drag confessions out of anyone.”
Lorenzo’s gaze shifted.
“I heard you.”
“Hearing and agreeing are separate services.”
Emma climbed onto the bed.
“Don’t fight.”
Marisol looked at her.
“I like you.”
“I have Bunny.”
“An excellent credential.”
For three days, Lorenzo remained beneath the laundry wing.
I worked my normal shifts.
At five in the morning, I ironed Victoria’s black dresses.
At noon, I carried soup through the linen closet.
At night, I changed dressings, checked temperature, and slept on a narrow cot while Emma curled beside Lorenzo with Bunny between them.
The house grew stranger.
Marco increased guards at every gate.
Victoria entered Lorenzo’s office and began moving files.
Three senior captains came and went after midnight.
The portrait of Lorenzo’s mother was removed from the study for “preservation.”
Victoria occupied the main bedroom but continued sleeping in the guest suite.
She was not grieving.
She was waiting to inherit.
On the second night, Lorenzo asked about Daniel.
Emma had brought two cookies into the storm room and announced that her father liked chocolate even though “he went to heaven before he could finish being old.”
Lorenzo looked at me.
“How did he die?”
“Construction accident.”
“Where?”
“Ashford Heights.”
His spoon stopped against the soup bowl.
“What phase?”
“Second tower.”
“When?”
“Three years ago. April ninth.”
A cold stillness entered his face.
“Who owned the project?”
“You know.”
“Yes.”
“Victoria’s father.”
“Ashford Urban Development.”
“Daniel fell from the twelfth floor. The company said he unclipped his safety line.”
“Did you believe them?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because Daniel complained about the anchor system for two weeks. He photographed a frayed cable. After he died, the photograph vanished from his phone.”
“Did you have counsel?”
“For ninety days. Then the attorney said Ashford’s experts would make us look desperate.”
“Settlement?”
“None.”
“Insurance?”
“Denied for alleged worker misconduct.”
Lorenzo set the bowl down.
May you like
His face had lost color for reasons unrelated to fever.
“The Duca construction fund financed the second tower.”
