Chương 7
“You the one who fell down?”
“Yes.”
“The child used her medicine on you.”
“Yes.”
“And now her mother is in jail.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Alvarez moved aside. “Five minutes.”
Emma sat on the floor beneath a blanket, lining up crayons beside the rabbit backpack.
When Alejandro entered, she looked at his face, then at his shoes.
“You’re breathing.”
“I am.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
She nodded as if this seemed fair.
Alejandro stayed near the doorway. He had faced armed men in warehouses without discomfort, but the child’s quiet attention made him unsure where to place his hands.
“I came to thank you.”
“You sent medicine.”
“I did.”
“Mama was mad.”
“I heard.”
“Did you fire her?”
“No.”
“Lillian did.”
“I reversed it.”
Emma touched the tip of a blue crayon. “She’s still in jail.”
Alejandro looked at Mercer.
The attorney said, “Your mother will have a bail hearing tomorrow.”
Emma’s eyes shifted to him. “Will she come home?”
“We are working on it.”
“That means you don’t know.”
Mercer closed his mouth.
Alejandro moved closer and lowered himself onto one knee. Pain crossed his face before he could hide it.
“Your mother did not poison me.”
Emma stared at him.
“I believe someone put evidence in her locker.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You know lots of bad people.”
Mrs. Alvarez made a small sound near the kitchen.
Alejandro looked at Emma. “Yes.”
“Did one of them do it?”
“Probably.”
“Because of you?”
The room became very still.
Alejandro glanced at the crayons, the folded blanket, the chipped coffee table. Ordinary objects offered no assistance.
“Yes,” he said.
Emma’s fingers closed around the blue crayon.
“Then fix it.”
He almost told her he would. The promise rose automatically, shaped by years of giving orders and calling them certainty.
Instead, he said, “I will try.”
Emma looked disappointed.
That was worse.
Elena’s bail was set at an amount she could not pay.
Alejandro offered the money. Elena refused through the attorney Mercer had hired for her, a former prosecutor named Rachel Kim.
“She says accepting your help will make her look controlled by you,” Rachel told him outside the courthouse.
“She is in a county jail.”
“She understands where she is.”
“She has a child.”
“She understands that too.”
Alejandro stood beneath the courthouse steps while reporters waited beyond the barricade. “Then arrange a bond through someone else.”
Rachel’s expression hardened. “That is still your money.”
“Money does not care whose name is on the check.”
“Juries do. Prosecutors do. Reporters certainly do.”
Sofia joined them, carrying two coffees. She handed one to Rachel and kept the other.
“What does Elena want?” Sofia asked.
“To be released without becoming indebted to the man whose household she is accused of poisoning.”
“That may not be available.”
“Then she wants the least damaging version.”
A community bail fund agreed to post the bond after reviewing Elena’s finances and the evidence. Alejandro reimbursed nothing. He hated the helplessness of respecting the boundary.
Elena left the courthouse after dark through a side entrance.
Emma ran toward her, then stopped at the last second, as though afraid her mother might disappear if struck too hard. Elena closed the distance herself.
They held each other beside a row of metal trash cans while cameras flashed from the far end of the alley.
Alejandro watched from inside a parked car.
Sofia sat beside him.
“You could go speak to her.”
“She does not want me.”
“Few people do. You usually don’t let that stop you.”
He looked through the rain-streaked window.
Elena lifted Emma into her arms. The child’s mint-green bow had been replaced by a yellow elastic band. One rabbit ear on the backpack had folded over.
“I should have known what was happening in my own house,” Alejandro said.
Sofia sipped her coffee. “You knew many things were happening.”
“Not this.”
“That may be the problem. You built a place where everyone hides something. Then you became surprised when someone hid the thing that could kill you.”
He turned toward her.
She looked back without flinching.
“Go home,” she said. “You look like a corpse in a sweater.”
The digital evidence developed slowly.
Forensic examiners recovered fragments of the erased camera file, but not enough to reveal the figure’s face. The audio track contained the click of the study door, the scrape of glass on wood, and twelve seconds of muffled speech from the hallway.
A man’s voice said, “You were supposed to replace it.”
Another answered, “I did what you asked.”
Then the signal cut.
Dominic identified the second voice as his own.
He admitted speaking with Gabriel outside the study shortly after 2:00 p.m. Gabriel had asked whether the expired injector had been removed. Dominic said yes. Gabriel told him the replacement had been delivered.
The first voice might have been Gabriel’s, but the recording was distorted.
Gabriel denied the conversation.
Dominic’s credibility suffered when investigators discovered he had deleted three text messages from Gabriel the night of the poisoning. The messages were later recovered from a cloud backup.
Check his desk.
Remove anything expired.
Don’t involve medical staff. I’ll handle it.
Dominic insisted he had believed Gabriel wanted to prevent Alejandro from using unsafe medication.
Detective Brooks asked why he deleted the messages.
Dominic sat with both hands flat on the interview table.
“Because after he collapsed, they looked bad.”
“They looked bad because they were bad.”
“They looked worse than they were.”
“That is what people say before deleting evidence.”
He rubbed the fading scratches on his wrist.
“I panicked.”
“You also threatened a child.”
His eyes lowered.
“I panicked then too.”
Victor’s lies were different.
May you like
He had installed the hidden camera at Alejandro’s direction but failed to record it in the security inventory. He had also accepted cash from Gabriel for allowing delivery trucks to bypass standard inspection on four occasions.
The trucks carried stolen construction materials from Moretti-owned sites. Victor claimed he thought Gabriel was hiding theft from Alejandro, not arranging murder.
