Chapter 7 - The Woman at the Night Desk
Nadine Fournier had worked at the hotel for six years. She could recognize a repeat guest by the sound of his shoes on marble, and she knew which executives requested rooms on floors where their spouses would not find them. She had learned to say good evening to all of them with equal courtesy. That didn't mean she failed to notice when a guest requested an electronic key after the system showed somebody else had already checked in.
Nadine met with hotel counsel and investigators, not in Elena's suite. Her representative explained that she feared retaliation because a supervisor had ordered her to treat the room-key issue as an innocent software error. She supplied her own contemporaneous incident note, created minutes after the suspicious request, and identified the supervisor who overrode a warning. Her account placed Matteo Serra in the lobby shortly before Silas Ward entered Elena's room. She had seen Matteo hand the supervisor a cardholder bearing Moretti Maritime's logo.
The hotel supplied the relevant records under the investigation process. The key override had been entered using a supervisor's credentials; the access report then displayed Enzo's name because his corporate account paid for Elena's reservation. The false appearance that Enzo himself had entered was a billing-system artifact, not proof he'd been near the room. Elena felt furious all over again. Someone had taken advantage of a mundane hotel shortcut to frighten her and implicate the very man most likely to protect her from an intrusion.
The damaged sunscreen bottle returned from preliminary technical examination that afternoon. Investigators confirmed a small commercially available location tag had been placed beneath its label. They found no basis in the initial testing to conclude the sunscreen contained an added harmful substance. Elena hadn't used that bottle; Marco had applied sunscreen from his personal tube. The discovery didn't make the intrusion harmless. Someone had entered her private space without permission and apparently hoped to learn where a bottle she carried might travel.
“Why track me with sunscreen?” Elena asked.
Marco set the report down. “A toiletry can move from hotel to purse to car without attracting attention. It can also be thrown away. Whoever planned it was taking a chance.”
“Or they wanted a reason to get close enough to replace something else,” Francesca suggested. She immediately added, “We don't know. Don't put guesses into the record.”
Elena agreed. She was learning that the truth sometimes arrived as a series of limits: what a photograph didn't prove, what a bank record didn't reveal, what a frightened witness couldn't be expected to remember. Those limits did not weaken the investigation. They kept it from becoming another story assembled by the people with the loudest voices.
Nadine's statement gave the authorities a clearer route to question Matteo and Silas. It also prompted the hotel to suspend access privileges for the supervisor involved while it conducted its own employment review. Nadine remained employed, with her schedule and contact arrangements adjusted after consultation with counsel. She didn't become a glamorous whistleblower overnight. She still had rent due, an aging mother to help, and real reasons to worry. Elena wrote her a thank-you note without describing her to reporters or promising outcomes nobody could guarantee.
That afternoon, Enzo's board received a report from the special committee. Its investigators had confirmed unauthorized related-party payments and significant deficiencies in the compensation records. They recommended freezing Bellwater-related disbursements, removing Dario and Matteo from any authority over the fund pending further process, and appointing an outside administrator agreed upon with claimant representatives. The report did not determine criminal liability; relevant findings and records would be referred to competent authorities.
Dario responded by contacting a business columnist. An article appeared that evening accusing Enzo of destabilizing a profitable enterprise to impress a female employee, and implying Elena had manipulated him by concealing her father's role in the fire. The article cited anonymous sources and included a cropped version of the terrace photograph. No one had asked Lucia Morales whether she had received the money promised after her husband's death.
Elena read the piece once. Then she closed it and wrote a factual statement for her attorney's review: she was cooperating with the independent review, had not requested preferential treatment, and would not comment on ongoing questions involving claimants' private information. She declined three interview requests. The impulse to defend herself on every social platform was powerful, but she would not turn Lucia's missing compensation into a debate about her own love life.
Enzo wanted to sue the columnist immediately. Francesca reminded him that some statements were opinions, others might be actionable, and all required careful assessment. More urgently, the lender group had called a meeting for the following morning. If it refused the bridge financing, the company could miss payroll. His instinct was to offer personal guarantees until everyone stopped asking questions. The finance advisers cautioned him against pledging assets before the fund's exposure was understood.
He found Elena in the hotel's small reading room, where she was studying a paperback mystery without absorbing a word. “I heard you turned down the interviews,” he said.
“I don't want to make someone else's grief a backdrop for my character defense.”
“I can tell the press the terrace was my fault.”
“You can correct inaccurate statements about the company, including your conduct, if counsel advises it. Don't describe my feelings for me.”
He sat in the opposite chair. “Do you have feelings for me?”
She closed the book. “What an astonishingly badly timed question.”
“I know.”
“I liked you before Monaco. I still see things in you I like. But I don't know whether I can trust what happens when you're frightened.”
Enzo accepted the answer. He didn't ask her to make it kinder. “I'm going to give up direct oversight of the compensation work,” he said. “The committee's already appointed an interim lead. Your reporting line won't come through me.”
“That's appropriate whether I like you or not.”
“Yes.”
She almost smiled. They sat reading separate books until Marco texted that his partner Theo had sent a joke so terrible it required witnesses. For fifteen minutes, nothing in their lives was a crisis. Elena treasured the ordinariness without mistaking it for a solution.
At nine, Lucia's attorney forwarded a newly located bank record. It showed that a payment corresponding to her claim had been made eight years earlier—but not to any account she'd ever owned. The account's opening paperwork bore her name and a mailing address at a commercial office used by Bellwater. The attached identity document was a photocopy with a photograph that plainly wasn't Lucia.
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The investigators could now trace a specific allegedly fraudulent payment, not merely a suspicious accounting category. The discovery gave the workers a foundation for a concrete claim. It also raised a devastating question for Antonio: who had access to the original documents used to impersonate the claimants?
A second page supplied part of the answer. In the file's document history, the disputed identification had been uploaded from a workstation assigned to Matteo Serra's department. That alone didn't establish who had used the computer. But it was a lead the investigators could follow, and it arrived just as Matteo was demanding access to the fund's archives one last time.
