Chapter 4 - The Man Behind the Cameras
By sunrise, nobody in the Moretti mansion trusted anybody.
Security guards were separated and questioned.
Phones were collected.
Camera logs were examined.
Kitchen staff remained in one room.
Drivers in another.
Lucia stayed upstairs with Mia and me while Adrian and Dante worked through the night.
At eight, I found Mia carefully brushing Lucia's silver hair.
“You have tangles,” Mia informed her.
“At my age, darling, I have earned every one.”
Mia giggled.
The sound felt strange inside a house filled with armed men.
Lucia watched me through the mirror.
“You haven't slept.”
“Neither have you.”
“I've spent forty years married into this family. I learned long ago that sleep is sometimes a luxury.”
“Were you afraid of Adrian's father?”
She became quiet.
“Sometimes.”
That answer surprised me.
“Was he…”
“A complicated man.”
People used that word when the truth required too many painful sentences.
Lucia touched Mia's hand.
“He loved his children. He also believed fear was the same thing as respect. Adrian spent half his life proving his father right and the other half trying to prove him wrong.”
I thought about Adrian downstairs.
“What changed him?”
Lucia looked toward the window.
“His younger brother died.”
I had not known Adrian had a brother.
“Matteo was twenty-two. He wanted nothing to do with the family business. Silvio thought he could toughen him up.”
“What happened?”
“A warehouse meeting went wrong.”
Her eyes filled.
“Matteo was standing beside someone he should never have been near.”
The meaning was clear.
He had been killed because of a life he didn't choose.
“Adrian blamed his father?”
“Adrian blamed everyone. Mostly himself.”
A knock sounded.
Dante entered.
“Elena, Adrian needs you downstairs.”
My stomach tightened.
“What happened?”
“We found the security leak.”
The control room was beneath the west wing.
Ten monitors covered the walls.
Adrian stood behind a seated guard named Samuel Ortega.
I remembered him from the previous afternoon.
Quiet.
Polite.
He had brought Mia hot chocolate.
Now his hands were trembling.
Adrian placed a brass button on the desk.
“Your uniform.”
Samuel shook his head.
“No.”
Dante opened a locker.
Inside was a jacket missing one button.
My skin prickled.
Samuel stood.
“I didn't take that photograph.”
“You lost your button outside the perimeter,” Dante said.
“I haven't been outside the perimeter.”
“Then explain it.”
“I can't.”
Adrian watched him.
“Try.”
Samuel looked around the room.
He was terrified.
Not of Adrian.
Of someone else.
“I have a daughter.”
Adrian's expression changed.
“So?”
“She’s sixteen.”
Samuel's voice cracked.
“They know where she goes to school.”
Silence.
“What did they make you do?” Adrian asked.
Samuel covered his face.
“Turn off cameras. Three minutes at a time. Sometimes five.”
“When?”
“Six times in the last month.”
Dante cursed.
“Who?”
“I never saw him.”
Samuel reached into his pocket.
Dante immediately moved.
“Easy.”
Samuel pulled out an old prepaid phone.
“They text this.”
Adrian read the messages.
Each one contained a camera number and time.
Then another message.
A photograph of Samuel's daughter.
Adrian's anger became frighteningly quiet.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
Samuel laughed bitterly.
“Because you're Adrian Moretti.”
For a moment, nobody spoke.
It might have been the most honest sentence anyone had said inside that house.
Samuel continued.
“You help people when it suits you. But men disappear around your family. I didn't know if telling you would protect my daughter or make things worse.”
Adrian absorbed that without flinching.
“I understand.”
Samuel looked shocked.
“So you're not going to…”
“No.”
Adrian handed the burner phone to Dante.
“We protect his daughter.”
Dante nodded.
Samuel stared.
“Why?”
“Because threatening children is where this ends.”
I believed him.
That frightened me almost as much as not believing him would have.
The burner phone led them to a telecommunications shop in Brooklyn.
The purchase had been made with cash.
Security footage showed a man wearing a baseball cap.
Dante enhanced the image.
Lucia recognized him.
“Peter.”
“Who?” I asked.
Adrian's face hardened.
“Peter Vale.”
Dr. Warren Vale's son.
Lucia's longtime physician.
The same doctor whose medication schedule had been altered.
Within an hour, they learned Dr. Vale had disappeared.
His office was closed.
His apartment empty.
His bank accounts had been drained two days earlier.
“He ran,” Dante said.
“Or someone made it look that way,” Adrian replied.
Then another piece arrived.
Camille's abandoned car had been found at LaGuardia Airport.
But she had not boarded a plane.
Her phone was discovered beneath a seat in Terminal B.
“She wants us to think she left New York,” Dante said.
“No,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“She wants you to waste time proving she didn't.”
Adrian studied me.
“What do you mean?”
“I clean hotel rooms. Do you know how many cheating husbands leave a second phone in a room and tell their wives they're traveling? People create fake clues because they want you looking somewhere else.”
Dante gave Adrian a look.
“She has a point.”
I folded my arms.
“I'm standing right here.”
To my surprise, Adrian almost smiled.
They went back through Camille's movements.
This time they searched what she had done before leaving.
At eleven twenty the previous morning, she had visited the family chapel.
At eleven thirty-two, she had entered the old greenhouse.
At eleven forty-eight, she called Silvio.
The call lasted nine seconds.
Then something caught my attention.
“Wait.”
Dante paused the video.
Camille had entered the greenhouse carrying her purse.
She left without it.
Adrian looked toward the window.
The greenhouse stood at the edge of the estate.
They searched it immediately.
Inside an old planting cabinet, Dante found the purse.
No poison.
No documents.
Only a key.
A numbered bank deposit key.
And a photograph.
Adrian picked it up.
The color left his face.
The picture showed Adrian's younger brother Matteo.
Alive.
Standing beside Camille.
The date printed on the back was three days after the warehouse explosion in which Matteo had supposedly died.
Lucia dropped into a chair.
“That isn't possible.”
Adrian said nothing.
His hands began shaking.
Dante whispered, “Boss…”
Adrian turned the photograph over.
Four words were written across the back.
YOUR BROTHER KNOWS THE TRUTH.
For years Adrian Moretti had believed his brother died because of the family.
May you like
Now someone wanted him to believe Matteo had survived.
And if the photograph was real, then every secret in the mansion had just become smaller than the one staring back at us.
