Chapter 4
The freight alarm sounded only once. Its metallic chime traveled through the walls like a spoon striking a glass.
Damian instructed Vince to remain with Sophia and Elena. Cole accompanied him to the service hall, keeping his hands visible and his gun holstered. Damian had no intention of turning the mansion into a crime scene of his own making.
The loading door stood closed. An amber beacon above it blinked twice and went dark.
“Who triggered that?” Damian asked.
Cole studied the panel. “Looks like a manual test. Someone with administrator access could run it remotely.”
“Can you tell whose account?”
“Not from this display. The contracted alarm company keeps a separate event log.”
“Call them, then. Ask that they preserve the original records. Don’t alter anything.”
Cole glanced at him with evident surprise. Until that day, requests for security records had always passed through Marco.
Back in the study, Damian found Sophia sitting in his chair, her feet swinging above the floor. Elena was showing her a photograph of Nero as a puppy. The child smiled, but her eyes looked tired.
“Did somebody get hurt?” she asked.
“No.” Damian crouched beside her. “I asked somebody to check the sound.”
“Sometimes grown-ups say ‘no’ when they mean ‘I don’t know.’”
Elena gave a small, embarrassed sigh. “That’s Nora talking.”
“Then Nora’s right,” Damian said. “I don’t know yet.”
Sophia accepted the correction. She slid from the chair and returned to the dog, choosing the safest place in the room without waiting for anyone’s permission.
An hour later, Dr. Keller’s signed records arrived. The photographs showed a fresh cut exactly where Sophia had touched the scar. The report recorded Nora as the person who paid for treatment. The timestamp was 12:56 a.m.
Beneath the injury description, Dr. Keller had written: “Patient displays marked fear response when approached by male handler wearing dark gloves. Settles with female caretaker.”
There was no finding that Nora had harmed Nero. No mention of a kennel gate.
Damian compared the report with Adrian’s incident summary. The summary claimed Nero had been uninjured at midnight and taken for evaluation the following afternoon after Nora allegedly attempted to steal files.
The two accounts could not both be true.
His outside lawyer, Daniel Brooks, arrived before dinner and insisted on a careful sequence of steps: preserve the contradictory documents, correct Damian’s affidavit through Nora’s lawyer and the prosecutor, and let an independent forensic accountant inspect the foundation records.
“You can’t erase what you signed,” Daniel said. “You can put a dated correction beside it.”
Damian stared at his original statement on the desk. He had written that Nora possessed unrestricted access to financial accounts. Yet her job description required two approvals for every disbursement above ten thousand dollars.
“Why didn’t I notice?”
“Because you believed the person who assembled the packet,” Daniel replied. “Now the hard part is proving where the mistake came from.”
Elena entered carrying tea. She stopped when she saw the papers.
“There’s something else,” she said. “Marco filed three separate complaints about Nero in the month before Nora was arrested. He said the dog had lunged at cleaners near the service corridor. I never saw Nero do that.”
“Why file those complaints?” Damian asked.
“To keep everybody away from the door. We were told the corridor was unsafe.”
Daniel wrote down the dates. Three incidents, three warnings, one restricted passage. Repetition made the false story look routine.
Helen Ward called again while Damian compared the warning slips. The accountant had checked publicly available vendor information and found no matching inspection photographs in the foundation's accessible project folders.
"That is a missing record, not proof the visit never happened," she reminded him. "I'd like site managers to verify which contractors actually came through."
Damian authorized the request through the independent trustees. He was discovering how often he had treated a clean-looking folder as proof that somebody had done the work inside it.
Daniel placed a second document next to the first. One purported dog incident occurred on a day Nero's vaccination record placed him at a veterinary appointment away from the estate. There might have been a late entry or an innocent date error. Even so, the inconsistency deserved verification.
"Don't force this to fit," Daniel warned. "Let the evidence tell us what it can."
"I'm beginning to see how little I asked before," Damian answered.
Sophia appeared in the doorway with her drawing clutched to her chest. “Is Mommy coming home?”
Damian couldn’t promise it. “Her lawyer is working to bring her home. I’m going to tell the truth about what I know.”
Sophia studied him for a long moment. “Even if your cousin gets mad?”
“Yes.”
She nodded and held out the drawing. “Then maybe you need the back.”
May you like
Damian turned the page.
Written there in Nora’s neat handwriting were seven words: “Ask why the cameras went dark first.”
