Chapter 4 - The Man Who Controlled My Doors
Brendan Doyle had protected me for twelve years.
He had taken a bullet outside Providence.
He had dragged me from a burning warehouse.
He knew every alarm code, every camera angle, every employee schedule and every weakness in my house.
Which meant that if Brendan wanted Tessa dead, she had survived four years only because he allowed it.
I returned to the car holding the black card.
He looked at it once.
Then his expression changed.
“Where did you get that?”
“Tessa.”
He stared toward the apartment building.
“Is she upstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Get her out.”
The urgency in his voice was real.
“Why?”
“Because that emblem isn’t mine.”
I handed him the card.
Brendan ran his thumb across the silver crest.
“These were used before I became security chief.”
“By who?”
“Your father’s security team.”
My father had been dead six years.
Brendan opened an encrypted archive on his tablet and pulled up security documents from nine years earlier.
The week Nicholas died.
Two days before the harbor explosion, Brendan had been removed from Nicholas’s detail.
“Who removed you?”
“Graham Keane.”
My attorney.
My father’s oldest friend.
The man who had sat beside me at Nicholas’s funeral.
Graham had advised my family for thirty years.
He had helped settle my father’s estate.
He knew where every legitimate business account was held.
And where the illegitimate ones had once been hidden.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did.”
Brendan opened another file.
An email dated October 5, nine years earlier.
TO: VINCENT MORETTI.
SUBJECT: NICHOLAS SECURITY CHANGE.
I had never received it.
Brendan continued.
“Someone removed me from his protection detail. Then someone deleted every copy of my warning from your server.”
I thought about Tessa’s message.
Someone sent me there.
Maybe she had never been brought into my house so she could be watched.
Maybe she had been brought there because someone wanted her to watch me.
Tessa called suddenly.
I answered.
She didn’t say hello.
“Vincent, Eli found something in one of my old boxes.”
“What?”
“A photograph.”
“Of Nicholas?”
“No.”
Her voice trembled.
“It’s a photograph of the hallway outside your bedroom.”
I looked at Brendan.
Tessa continued.
May you like
“There’s a camera hidden inside the lamp.”
The lamp she had left burning every night.
