Chapter 7 - The Interview Nobody Could Cancel
The first threat reached Veronica at work on a Monday, tucked beneath the drawing of her redesigned train platform. It was a photograph of Kina's overturned car, printed from an angle that had never appeared in the news. On the back someone had written, ASK YOUR SISTER HOW LONG SHE CAN HOLD HER BREATH.
Veronica took the photograph to her supervisor and asked that the office preserve the security footage. She then called the police through the video relay service she used for telephone conversations. She did not call Raphael first. She had spent years watching other people decide that protecting her meant excluding her from the truth, and she had no intention of returning to that arrangement.
Kina arrived with Leah twenty minutes later. She looked at the image, swallowed hard, and went to her sister. Veronica signed fiercely: "Don't say you're sorry. It isn't your fault that someone sent it. Tell me what we're doing."
"We're reporting it," Kina said. "Then I'm asking what you want."
"I want to go back to work after lunch. And I want a copy for my lawyer."
Leah agreed to coordinate the evidence with the investigator. Security cameras had captured a visitor using a contractor badge to pass the lobby desk. The face was partly obscured, but the badge number corresponded to South Basin Equipment. The same number had been used for the pickup of Merrick's registered packet years earlier. The connection was stronger than a familiar watch. It linked a person or a reused credential to two separate events that had been hidden from official records.
Raphael learned about the threat from Kina, not from his guards. He went straight to her office at the community restoration studio, where she had returned to working part-time. She met him on the public sidewalk before he could enter.
"If you make my sister quit her job, I'll be furious," she said.
"I wasn't going to."
"If you send men to sit outside her apartment without asking, I'll be furious about that too."
"I know." He took a breath. "What would actually help?"
She studied him, then handed him an address. "Leah is meeting with the investigators. They may ask whether you know the person whose badge was used. Answer their questions. Don't answer for me."
Inside the interview room, a detective laid out the badge records and photographs. The person had signed in under the name Simon Vale, the same name associated with Merrick's missing registered packet. South Basin's records listed Simon as a temporary driver who had never completed hiring paperwork. His photograph was missing. His badge had been reactivated repeatedly by Victor Salcedo's security office.
"Do you know Simon Vale?" the detective asked Raphael.
"I know the name was on payment authorizations I've seen recently. I can't identify the person. I should have been able to. I signed a budget for the department that paid him."
"Can you obtain the original approvals?"
"My attorney has arranged preservation. You'll get them through the proper process."
Kina took her turn. She described the crash without exaggerating the four seconds in which she had seen the watch and scar. She told the detective what she had reported five years earlier, including the rescue crew's arrival and the missing box. When asked whether Tobias might have been the man, she said she couldn't know from the hand alone. Tobias's old injury report had now been located; it documented his scar years before her crash and did not place him near Interstate 95 that day. Her memory remained important without becoming an identification it could not support.
"Did you ever see the driver's face?" the detective asked.
"No. I told the first officer that too. Nobody wrote it down."
The detective made a point of repeating her answer into the recorder. It was an ordinary procedure. To Kina it felt like the smallest form of justice she'd encountered in years.
When the interview ended, Raphael found Victor standing near the courthouse parking garage. The security chief was alone, without a weapon visible, his hands deep in his coat pockets. Raphael stopped six feet away, far enough to refuse the invitation to turn this into a private conversation.
"Your uncle wants you at dinner," Victor said. "He thinks the family can settle this."
"My attorneys can speak to his."
Victor's mouth twitched. "You're making strangers more powerful than your family."
"They're allowed to ask questions you keep trying to bury."
"Kina isn't what you think she is. She knew about the trust before she married you."
Raphael felt the old reflex to defend her as though she were absent or incapable. He stopped it. "Then she'll answer for herself if she chooses."
Victor glanced toward the entrance, where Kina and Leah were coming outside. "Your grandfather would have hated what you're doing," he said.
"My grandmother wrote the trust," Raphael replied. "And you're going to stay away from my wife and her sister. The police have the threat."
He walked away before Victor could reply. He did not feel victorious. He felt frightened, not of Victor's power but of the many times he'd mistaken silence for loyalty.
Later, Kina told him what she hadn't said in the interview. She had known the family trust existed before agreeing to the contract. Aurelio had shown her an unsigned summary, claiming Raphael would lose his home and employees' pensions if he didn't marry. She hadn't been trying to trap Raphael. She had believed their marriage would prevent another family from being ruined the way hers had been.
"I should have told you," she said. "I was ashamed of how much I wanted the debt to vanish. And I didn't trust you to let me refuse if you knew I was asking questions."
Raphael sat across from her in the parlor. "I should have told you the trust condition was being challenged. I let my uncle negotiate with you as though you were a contract term. Neither of us was free to tell the whole truth in the room he arranged."
"That doesn't make what we did the same," Kina said.
"No. It doesn't."
Veronica arrived in the middle of their conversation carrying a box of pastries from a bakery near her office. She signed that her employer had approved stronger access procedures without changing her job. She had spent the afternoon drafting a visual emergency plan with the building manager. The pastries were her own idea of a celebration.
May you like
They were halfway through dessert when Leah phoned. Investigators had obtained an arrest warrant for Simon Vale under his real name, Daniel Croft, after matching an old contractor photograph to the lobby camera. Croft had worked directly for Aurelio's reclamation company. He was the man who had been sent to retrieve Merrick's packet and had later appeared near Kina's workplace.
But Croft had disappeared from his last registered address two days earlier. His employer's access records showed a final entry at the Santangelo house, using the service entrance Kina had stopped leaving unlatched only the previous week.
