22
DANIELA
Ravenand I pull into the garage and race into the house.
“Vinnie?”she calls.
“Office,” he barks back, his voice rough and caffeinated.
We pass through the living room, past last night’s strewn blankets and an abandoned water glass.In the office doorway, the air is warmer and stale with coffee.Vinnie’s at the computer, the blue light carving hollows under his eyes, four empty mugs to his right, a fifth cooling by his left elbow.The desk is a field of tabs and printouts, yellow legal pad scrawls, a jumble of names and arrows and dates crisscrossing like battle plans.
He doesn’t look up.“I’m on it,” he says to the screen.
“How long since you blinked?”Raven asks, stepping in behind me.
He finally glances over.His eyes are bloodshot.“I’m fine.”
He is not fine.None of us are.
“Talk to us,” I say, keeping my voice level.“What do you have?”
Vinnie drags a spreadsheet onto the big monitor so we both can see.A list of names blooms there—maids, gardeners, guards, tutors—everybody who touched the money and danger of my father’s life.Beside each name, a sliver of a photo—a staff badge, a driver’s license, a wedding picture clipped from someone’s Facebook.A life.A record.
Except one slot is a hole.No name.No face.No dots to connect.Just a void that eats the grid around it.
“The chef,” Vinnie says.“Our phantom.I’ve got Lucía, Mateo, Rosa—hell, I even found a retired dog that used to patrol the east wall.And not only that, I found Serena tucked away—the woman your father was hiding from my grandfather all those years, and he hid her well.Still, I found shit on her.Everybody’s got a footprint.Except that fucking chef.He wiped himself and the paper he stood on.No income or customs trail.No apartment leases.No medical records.No goddamned shadow.”
Raven crosses her arms.“And Gordon Brown?”
“Pops up everywhere,” Vinnie says.“Which is exactly the problem.It’s a smoke grenade of a name.Public raffles, PTA lists in three states, a hobbyist chocolate blog that looks like it was built last Tuesday.All dead ends.Not one of them is the man who cooked for your father, Dani.”
My stomach flips.The memory of that Valentine’s Day card sits cold behind my ribs.The chocolates.And the roses—blood-red blooms strangled by rusty barbed wire so the thorns were redundant.
“Did you hear anything while you were down here?”I ask Vinnie.“Footsteps?Doorbell?Something?”
He shakes his head.“Anyone who came through would have to go through the security gate.I’d have gotten a call.”
“Yeah,” Raven says, “but here’s the thing.The DHS thing for Dani was a decoy.Judge Matthews checked it out for us this morning.So we figured?—”
“Fuck,” he says.“You figured it was a way to get the two of you—or at least Daniela—out of the house.”
“Right,” I say.“So was anyone here?”
“Like I said, they’d have to go through security.”
“Not if they had a clicker,” Raven says.“Was anyone here?”
“I’ve been here the whole time, baby.”Vinnie grabs Raven’s hand.
“I know, but you’ve been focused and sleep deprived.Can you check the security footage?”
“Baby…”
“Please,” she says.“Humor us.”
He exhales hard through his nose and then wakes a different keyboard.The security grid comes into view—front door, garage, side gate, patio, back door, entrance to my mother-in-law suite.Time stamps tick green in the corners.
“Front door was good until—” Vinnie pauses.The box blinks, shows static, and then black.“Until thirty-nine minutes ago.”
