Chương 3
Elena sat back on her heels.
There were moments when fear became too large for the body and changed into anger because anger fit better. Her fingers closed around the vial until its rim bit her skin.
“You are going to tell me exactly what is happening.”
“Yes.”
“No fragments. No dramatic pauses. No protecting me by deciding what I can handle.”
“Yes.”
“And if you lie, I will open that door and call Pike back.”
Raphael studied her face. His weakness had not removed his ability to measure threats.
“Your brother worked for me,” he said.
The stone compartment seemed to shift beneath Elena’s knees.
“My brother stocked shelves at a hardware store.”
“Daniel worked at the hardware store during the day.”
“Don’t.”
“At night, he drove.”
“Don’t say his name.”
“He drove three times for one of our distribution companies. He was told the cargo was counterfeit electronics. On the fourth run, he opened a crate.”
Daniel had been dead four years. A truck fire on Interstate 94, the police had said. Driver fatigue. A blown tire. An accident so ordinary that the newspaper gave it four inches beneath a photograph of a high school baseball team.
Elena had identified him through a window because the county employee would not let her enter the room.
She remembered nothing about the employee’s face. She remembered a coffee stain on his shirt and the way he kept saying unfortunate as if repetition could soften the word.
Raphael continued. “The crate contained fentanyl.”
Elena’s hand moved before she decided to move it.
The slap turned his head against the stone.
He accepted it without raising an arm.
“You killed him.”
“No.”
“You put him in that truck.”
“I did not know his name until after.”
“That is not innocence.”
“No.”
The simplicity of his answer stopped her second strike.
“He called someone from a gas station,” Raphael said. “He said he would go to the police. The call was intercepted. The truck was forced off the road before he reached the state line.”
Elena tasted metal where she had bitten the inside of her cheek.
“Who?”
“Vale gave the order. My cousin Dominic approved it.”
“And you?”
“I learned the next morning.”
“And did what?”
“Buried it.”
She rose so quickly the top of her head struck the stairs.
Pain flashed white. She shoved open the servants’ door, stumbled into the kitchen, and reached for the wall phone.
Raphael caught the hem of her robe.
He should not have had the strength. Perhaps he did not. His fingers slipped, closed again, and held.
“Listen to me.”
“Let go.”
“If you call from that phone, Vale will know before anyone answers.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will when he sends Pike upstairs to put your body beside mine.”
“Pike let you live.”
“Pike let you remain hidden. Those are not the same thing.”
Elena looked down at Raphael’s hand. A tattoo vanished beneath his cuff. His nails were clean. It offended her that a man could participate in so much dirt and still have clean hands.
“Why did you come to my door?” she asked.
He released the robe.
“At first, to tell you about Daniel.”
“And after?”
Raphael’s eyes moved away.
The delay was its own answer, but Elena wanted the humiliation of hearing him say it.
“After?”
“To see if your light was on.”
The kitchen seemed indecently quiet between thunderclaps.
“You watched me?”
“From the corridor.”
“Why?”
“Because you were alive.”
She almost laughed again. “A great many people are alive.”
“Not in this house.”
“That is a sentence designed to sound meaningful.”
“It is the truth.”
“You do not get to speak to me about truth.”
“No.”
She hated that he kept agreeing. She wanted defense, arrogance, something solid enough to strike.
Raphael dragged himself to one knee and failed to rise. His hand knocked against the phone. The device slid across the tile, its screen flashing the countdown Vale had sent.
Twenty-three minutes.
Elena picked it up.
“Where is the safe?”
“In the music room.”
“That room is on the first floor beside the main staircase.”
“Yes.”
“Which will be full of guards.”
“Yes.”
“Then the evidence is useless.”
“The lower service passage reaches the old wine cellar. From there, there’s a dumbwaiter shaft beside the music room.”
“The dumbwaiter has been sealed for decades.”
“Only at the kitchen end.”
She stared at him.
The mansion had one floor plan for guests, another for servants, and a third for the Orsini family. Elena had learned the first two by working. The third had always existed as a pressure in the walls.
“You planned an escape route.”
“My grandfather planned an escape route. I failed to improve on him in several ways.”
She looked at the open textbook on the table. Fluids and Electrolytes, underlined twice. She had an exam at nine. Her clinical placement began at six the following morning. Her tuition payment was due Friday. Her life, already narrow, had been arranged around hours and invoices and the belief that careful people could avoid catastrophe by preparing for it.
Daniel had been careful. He had packed sandwiches in wax paper. He had checked the oil every Sunday. He had once driven back eleven miles to return a wallet he found in a parking lot.
Carefulness had not saved him from Raphael Orsini’s world.
“What does the signed statement say?” she asked.
“It names Vale and Dominic in Daniel’s death.”
“Does it name you?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“Obstruction. Racketeering. Conspiracy. Other things.”
“You were going to give it to the government?”
“At dawn.”
“Why dawn?”
“My attorney arranged a meeting with federal prosecutors at six-thirty.”
“Where is your attorney?”
“Missing.”
The countdown reached twenty-one minutes.
A small sound came from the corridor. Not footsteps. A soft mechanical click.
Elena turned toward the ceiling molding.
May you like
Raphael followed her gaze. “Camera.”
She crossed to the dry-goods shelf, climbed onto a chair, and found a black lens no wider than a shirt button set into a knot in the wood. She covered it with a strip of flour sack.
