Chương 6
Elena described the accusation, the guards, and Lorenzo stopping the car. Patel asked where they had intended to take her.
“I don’t know.”
“Were you told you were free to leave?”
“No.”
“Were you threatened?”
“Not with words.”
“Did either man display a weapon?”
“No.”
“Did you believe you could refuse?”
Elena looked through the glass door toward the kitchen. Mara stood on a stool while Danny stirred powdered sugar into a bowl.
“No.”
Patel wrote that down.
“You understand this investigation may include more than the clock.”
Elena’s stomach tightened. “I need this job.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“It’s my answer.”
Patel lowered her pen. “Do you have somewhere safe to go tonight?”
“My apartment.”
“Does anyone from this house have a key?”
“Renata has copies of staff addresses and emergency contacts. I don’t know about keys.”
“Would you like an officer to check the apartment before you return?”
Elena almost said no. Accepting help could become another record, another person looking at the peeling paint above her kitchen window, another question about why Mara slept in a converted dining alcove separated by a curtain. Pride rose first. Fear pushed through it.
“Yes.”
Patel nodded as if it were an ordinary answer.
The conservator arrived with Celia Vaughn, the foundation registrar. Celia was a compact woman in a camel coat, with rain on her glasses and anger sharpening every movement. She walked past Lorenzo without greeting him and went directly to the clock.
The damage was serious but repairable. Moisture had entered through the broken foot. Several stones were loose. The mechanism had stopped from impact. The internal sensor showed the clock had been moved at 4:49, struck hard at 5:08, and exposed to outdoor humidity immediately afterward.
“That matches the child’s account,” Heller said.
“It matches someone moving the clock,” Celia replied. “Do not turn a sensor into a witness.”
She inspected the base and frowned. “The security seal is cut.”
Lorenzo stepped closer. “What seal?”
“The access panel beneath the mechanism. It was intact when we installed the sensor.”
The conservator removed four tiny screws and lifted the velvet-lined panel. Inside was the battery, the tracking device, and an empty slot no larger than a matchbox.
Celia’s face changed.
“What belongs there?” Patel asked.
“A brass capsule.”
“What’s in it?”
Celia hesitated.
Lorenzo looked at her. “Tell them.”
“The clock was donated by Carlo Bellandi’s granddaughter. The capsule contains a handwritten list of the craftsmen who restored the piece after it was smuggled out of Europe during the war. The document is historically significant. It was meant to be revealed at next week’s announcement.”
“Value?” Patel asked.
“Financially? Difficult to separate from the object. Historically, substantial.”
“Could someone sell it?”
“Not easily. But collectors buy things they cannot display.”
The clock was no longer merely damaged property left near an employee exit. Something had been removed deliberately before it was hidden.
Renata’s phone became central.
She claimed it was upstairs in her private apartment. Patel asked for consent to retrieve and examine it. Renata refused.
“That is my right,” she said.
“It is,” Patel replied.
Renata seemed disappointed by the lack of argument.
Heller asked whether the mansion’s network recorded connected devices. Price said the system logged them, though not their content. Renata’s phone had disconnected from the staff Wi-Fi at 4:46 and reconnected at 5:14. That could mean she had switched off Wi-Fi, entered an area with poor signal, or left the house.
“Can you see calls?” Patel asked.
“No.”
“Messages?”
“No.”
“Location?”
“Only which access point it used while connected.”
Renata’s phone had last connected near her office, then disappeared during the exact period when the camera went down and the study alarm was disarmed.
Still, that did not prove a call.
Patel told Renata she was not under arrest but could not enter her apartment while officers prepared a warrant application based on the evidence available. Renata’s expression held until she asked where she was expected to sit.
“The breakfast room,” Patel said.
“The child spilled juice in there last week. The rug has not been properly cleaned.”
Celia stared at her. “That is what concerns you?”
Renata looked at the registrar with the tired superiority she reserved for outsiders who believed wealth made them less untidy than everyone else. “No. It is what I said.”
She walked to the breakfast room with Collins behind her.
The mansion had grown strangely quiet. The donor dinner guests had left before the accusation, but their glasses still stood on tables in the main salon. Half-finished espresso had developed thin brown skins. A string quartet’s folding chairs remained near the fireplace, and one violinist had forgotten a black scarf.
Elena moved through those rooms with Patel while the officer asked her to retrace her work. The contrast between the polished front of the house and the service corridors irritated Elena in a way it had not before. She had dusted the carved tables, folded the towels, polished the silver, and become invisible so people could believe elegance appeared by itself.
At the west guest suite, she showed Patel the bathroom where she had delivered towels at 4:40. A disposable coffee cup sat in the wastebasket.
“That stain on Mara’s towel-cart drawing,” Elena said.
Patel photographed the cup.
The cup had been purchased from a café in town. The name “Marco” was written on the side.
Elena knew Marco DeLuca. Everyone on staff did, though he was not technically staff. He was Renata’s thirty-year-old son, a junior accounting manager for the Bellandi Foundation. He visited the mansion twice a month with payroll documents, usually carrying expensive coffee and speaking to his mother in impatient whispers.
“He was here today,” Elena said.
“Did you see him?”
“No. But he orders that drink. Oat milk, extra shot.”
“That could describe a lot of people.”
“He complains when they use the wrong lid.”
Patel glanced at the cup. “This is the wrong lid.”
May you like
Despite herself, Elena smiled.
They found another trace in the service elevator. A small smear of red sealing wax marked the brass rail at waist height. The envelope containing Renata’s study key had been sealed with the same color wax, though the household office used red wax on several documents.
