Chapter 4 - THE MAN BESIDE THE CAR
The man in the gray suit from Thomas's recording had a name: Owen Fletcher.
Daniel identified him through maintenance records from the garage. He was not a full-time mechanic. He was a contract technician who sometimes installed tracking systems for expensive vehicles and occasionally reviewed security footage for insurance claims. He had a small repair shop near an old industrial rail yard, and his phone had been disconnected since the Halloween party.
"He'll be hiding," Daniel said when he briefed Luca. "We can find him."
Luca's shoulders stiffened. "I want to speak to him."
Detective Park, who had come to review the household files, raised her hand.
"You won't approach a potential witness with a security team. I understand how badly you want answers, but doing that could make any later statement harder to trust. We will locate him through ordinary investigative steps."
Luca paced the study. His tattooed hand moved restlessly over a paperweight shaped like a ship.
"A man worked on my daughter's car the morning it crashed. I'm supposed to sit here?"
"You're supposed to protect your daughter, preserve what you have, and let us do our job," Park said.
I stood near the doorway carrying a tray of coffee nobody wanted. I thought about the millions of people who had waited helplessly for news from a hospital or a police station. Luca had enough money to purchase entire neighborhoods, but none of it could buy him a safe way around waiting.
He sat down at last.
I placed the tray on the side table and went upstairs. Sofia was building a Halloween town out of cardboard boxes, because despite everything that had happened, she still liked the holiday. She had drawn tiny doors on the buildings and assigned each character a place to live. The mayor was a stuffed purple octopus.
"Did Daddy find the man?" she asked.
"The police know his name," I answered. "They're trying to talk to him."
"Will they make him say why Thomas died?"
"They'll ask him what he knows. We may have to wait for all the answers."
She frowned. "Everybody's always making me wait."
"You're right," I said. "Waiting is terrible."
She handed me a pair of scissors. "You can cut the windows while we're terrible together."
I stayed with her until lunchtime.
Two days later, Owen Fletcher contacted Detective Park through an attorney. He asked for a meeting away from his workplace, saying he was afraid someone had been following him. Park arranged an interview with another investigator present. We learned about the interview only when she returned to the mansion to ask for copies of the garage's work orders.
"He admits he was in the garage," she told Luca. "He says Giovanni hired him to inspect a tracking device. He denies knowingly damaging the vehicle."
"He's lying," Luca said.
"He may be, but we need to prove it."
"The video shows an envelope."
"It does. Fletcher says it contained a payment authorization. We're checking the financial records."
I remembered how clearly Giovanni's voice had carried across the ballroom: MAKE SURE THE CAR DOESN'T REACH THE MEETING. It sounded monstrous enough to prove everything. But Detective Park was doing the work of separating the horror we felt from facts a court could actually test.
"Did he mention Thomas?" I asked.
"He said Thomas came into the garage while he was there and demanded to know why the car's maintenance schedule had changed. Fletcher says Thomas photographed the work order with his phone."
My heart thudded.
"Could the photograph still exist?"
"Possibly. We're examining the devices recovered after the crash. We can't assume it survived."
Thomas had been protecting the record before anyone realized they would need it. I wondered how many small decisions had carried us toward the Halloween party: a chauffeur taking a photograph, an eleven-year-old keeping a memory card, a housemaid refusing to let a pumpkin burn.
That afternoon, Mrs. Ortega found me folding laundry beside the back stairs. "There's a visitor in the kitchen," she said. "He says he wants to speak about a contract."
I looked up. "Who?"
"Mr. Bellini's accountant. Name of Simon Voss."
My stomach tightened. "Why is he here?"
"He says he has authorization to collect the remaining decorations."
I remembered the crates of imported lanterns and the hired florist who had left in tears after Vanessa criticized the color of the flowers. Decorations weren't evidence of murder. But an accountant appearing without notice two days after the police had seized a memory card felt wrong.
"Don't let him into the ballroom until Daniel verifies it," I said.
Mrs. Ortega had already done so. Daniel met the man at the entrance and explained that the police had asked the household not to disturb the party setup until documentation was complete. Simon smiled pleasantly, handed over a business card, and left without argument.
An hour later, Daniel checked the security logs. Simon had previously visited the mansion on the morning of Sofia's accident, using a maintenance-company identification badge under a slightly different name.
The spelling was R. Voss.
Daniel called Detective Park immediately.
The investigators traced the badge to a subcontractor that had access to the garage's vehicle lifts. A second person had signed in through the service entrance after Owen Fletcher left, using a temporary pass issued by Vanessa's office. That entry had never appeared in the report Daniel submitted after the crash because the records were stored in an event-management system he didn't normally review.
"Who gave him the pass?" Luca demanded.
"The request came from the engagement-planning office," Daniel answered. "It carried Vanessa's assistant's approval."
His face flushed. "I should have checked the service system seven months ago."
Luca shook his head. "We were all blind to what was happening inside this house."
"I was responsible for security," Daniel said. "I won't pretend otherwise."
I saw how deeply the admission cost him. In the months after the crash, he had worked late nights adding locks and cameras to Sofia's rooms, convinced that safety meant building more barriers. Now he was learning that someone had walked through an authorized entrance holding a perfectly legitimate badge.
That evening, Luca received a call from Dr. Chen. Sofia had missed a therapy session because her assigned transport van had been canceled without the doctor's knowledge. The cancellation notice cited "family preference" and had been submitted from an email address associated with Bellini Family Wellness.
Sofia had spent the morning watching the driveway, wondering why nobody came.
"I thought I was in trouble," she told me later.
"You weren't."
"Vanessa says I shouldn't get my hopes up about walking. Maybe she canceled it because I'm bad at therapy."
I put down the paints I'd been arranging. "Therapy isn't a test you pass or fail, Sofia. It's something you do with people who help you figure out what works for your body. You can have a hard day and still deserve the next appointment."
She was silent for a while. Then she asked me to help write Dr. Chen a note asking if they could practice standing beside the art easel instead of the therapy table. It seemed a small victory, and perhaps it was. But I was beginning to think small victories were the ones that lasted.
On Friday, Detective Park returned with a photograph recovered from Thomas's phone. The image was blurred along one edge but showed the vehicle's maintenance order lying on a garage workbench. Someone had written an additional note across the bottom: REPLACE THE PRESSURE ASSEMBLY AFTER THE ROAD TEST. NO OWNER SIGNATURE REQUIRED.
The note bore initials that did not belong to Thomas or Owen Fletcher.
"We have a forensic examination scheduled for the recovered vehicle," Park said. "This document gives us something specific to compare. It doesn't establish who made a mechanical change or whether that change caused the crash. But it's significant."
Luca stared at the photograph. "Thomas knew the work wasn't authorized."
"It appears he was concerned," Park answered. "We have to establish exactly what he saw."
Then she placed one more document on the desk. Investigators had obtained the contract used to hire Owen Fletcher. The payment had been routed through a company registered to Giovanni Bellini, but the work order had a second approving signature.
It was Vanessa's.
Luca read it without speaking. I watched his expression settle into something worse than anger: the slow recognition that he had allowed a woman he loved to decide what was safe for his child.
He looked toward the stairs where Sofia was practicing painting an orange moon. "I can't undo the last seven months," he said.
"No," I replied. "But you can stop letting other people decide the next seven."
He nodded once. There was no grand speech, no sudden promise to fix everything. He took out his phone, called Sofia's therapist, and made sure the appointment for Monday was confirmed directly with his daughter.
Then Detective Park's phone rang. She listened, asked one short question, and wrote something in her notebook.
"The independent mechanical examination has produced an initial finding," she said. "The brake system contains a replacement part that doesn't match the service history filed after the crash. The lab needs to determine when it was installed and whether it contributed to the failure."
May you like
Luca closed his eyes.
Somewhere upstairs, Sofia laughed at a joke Mrs. Ortega had made. The sound floated down the corridor, clear and ordinary, while the possibility of deliberate sabotage grew more real with every new document.
