Chapter 2 - THE PASSWORD OF A DEAD WOMAN
By midnight, the nursery looked like a crime scene.
The babies had been moved to my bedroom on the opposite side of the estate, where all three finally slept.
I stayed downstairs with Marco while his security technicians examined the black device.
Nobody wanted to say the obvious aloud.
Someone had deliberately placed it behind my children’s crib.
The device emitted a frequency high enough that most adults could not hear it, but young children sometimes could.
Sophie had heard it.
The triplets had apparently experienced it far more intensely.
“How dangerous?” I asked Dr. Gable.
He chose his words carefully.
“At the levels we measured, I don’t expect permanent injury. But prolonged exposure could cause severe distress.”
“Could someone have known that?”
“Yes.”
That answer changed everything.
Marco placed a laptop in front of me.
“The emitter was controlled wirelessly. It wasn’t malfunctioning.”
My jaw tightened.
“Show me.”
“It received activation commands at 6:04, 6:19, 6:47, 7:11, and 7:38.”
Each time matched another round of desperate crying.
Someone had been turning it on and off.
Testing us.
Watching us.
“From outside the property?”
Marco shook his head.
“That’s the strange part.”
The commands passed through our internal network.
Someone had valid access.
I stood slowly.
“Which account?”
Marco didn’t answer immediately.
That frightened me more than anything else.
“Which account?”
He turned the laptop around.
The authenticated user appeared on the screen.
LUCIA.MORETTI.
For several seconds, I forgot how to breathe.
Lucia had been my wife.
The mother of Theo, Miles, and Nora.
She had died eleven months earlier when her car left an icy road outside Highland Park.
Her account had been disabled after the funeral.
At least, that was what I had been told.
“That’s impossible.”
“I know.”
“Lucia is dead.”
Marco nodded.
“Someone reactivated her credentials three weeks ago.”
My hands curled into fists.
“Who has administrator access?”
“Me. Our IT director. And two executive-level accounts.”
“Names.”
“Yours.”
He paused.
“And Carlo’s.”
Carlo Moretti was my uncle.
My father’s younger brother.
The man who had practically raised me after my father died.
The man who stood beside me at Lucia’s funeral.
The man who held Nora for the first time because I had been too devastated to stop shaking.
“Find Carlo,” I said.
Marco immediately reached for his phone.
Before he could dial, Elena appeared in the doorway.
Her face was drained of color.
“Mr. Moretti?”
“What?”
She clutched something against her chest.
Sophie’s cloth doll.
“There’s something you need to know about this doll.”
I looked at her.
May you like
Elena’s eyes filled with tears.
“It belonged to your wife.”
