Chapter 2 - THE MAN IN THE GREEN JACKET
At breakfast Clara learned her husband had not slept.
She could tell from the careful way he folded the newspaper without reading it. Dominic had acquired that habit after his father's death, when people kept asking him to sign documents while he was still learning how to breathe around grief. He folded things into straight lines when he was trying to control an emotion he did not know where to put.
"There may be a recording device outside our bedroom," he said.
Clara set down her coffee. "What?"
"I found something in the molding. It hasn't been touched. An independent lawyer advised me not to interfere with it."
"An independent lawyer?"
"Naomi Bell. You recommended her to Marta after the payroll dispute."
Clara remembered a housekeeper who had been accused of stealing jewelry, then quietly reinstated when a manager admitted counting the inventory incorrectly. Naomi had represented Marta without informing Dominic of their conversations.
"Did you tell her about the cast?"
"I told her you were attacked. She said she could not represent you without asking you first. I agree with her."
It was an unfamiliar statement, and that made Clara wary. Her husband had always been gentlest after something frightened him. The gentleness sometimes lasted only until somebody refused his next instruction.
"I want to speak to her," Clara said. "Alone."
"I'll arrange an appointment if you want, or you can call directly."
"Give me her number."
He wrote it on a clean slip of paper. Clara noticed he used the right-handed pen she liked, not the heavy fountain pen that pulled at her injured wrist. It was a small consideration. She refused to let it substitute for the larger questions.
Leo Navarro entered shortly afterward with his face set in the way it became when he was protecting news from traveling ahead of him.
"We have an issue with one of the portrait staff," he said. "Anton called security at six."
Dominic looked up. "He contacted you?"
"Said he wanted to confirm a man's name. Green jacket, temporary service badge. I checked our roster. There's nobody by that description."
"How did he get inside?" Clara asked.
Leo seemed startled to hear her. "The photography team supplied three assistants. There was a catering company. The hotel sent a replacement technician to check the lighting circuits."
"A hotel technician?" Dominic repeated.
"From the Halcyon. Their events department said we requested someone familiar with Anton's equipment."
Clara felt the bruise along her wrist throb. The same hotel where a man with white-stitched boots had swung a steel tool at Dominic. Someone had followed the family home under the cover of a routine service call.
"Did you request him?" she asked Leo.
"No."
Dominic watched the deputy carefully. "Find the written authorization. Preserve the original. Do not confront anyone or remove the suspected device. Clara will choose what she wants to report."
Leo looked at him. "Boss, with respect, if someone is spying inside this house—"
"Then shouting at staff will tell them we're onto it."
"The men can search every room by lunch."
"Not before Clara decides what happens with the footage."
Leo's eyes flicked to her cast, visible beneath a loose sleeve. She saw shock and guilt cross his face.
"Mrs. Carretti," he said, "I didn't know."
"That is becoming a popular phrase in this house."
Neither man answered. She was glad.
At eleven, Naomi Bell met Clara in a small office above a bookshop in town. Clara insisted on driving with a licensed security driver who did not sit in the meeting. Dominic agreed, though the effort cost him something visible. Bell listened without interrupting as Clara described the garage attack, the urgent care visit, the portrait, and the suspected camera. She explained that her first priority was a safety plan Clara could control. Preserving evidence and contacting investigators could be done without handing the investigation to Dominic's men.
"Would you like to make a report today?" Bell asked.
"Yes. But I want a lawyer present. I also want the hospital records preserved."
"We'll request those."
"And I want to know if my husband's associates were involved."
Bell met her eyes. "Do you have a reason to suspect them?"
"The attack occurred on the afternoon a peace agreement was signed. The other side had no reason to target me if killing Dominic was enough. Someone wanted me quiet."
"About what?"
Clara hesitated. "I heard a conversation at the hotel. The lawyer representing the dock families mentioned an inventory of shipments that didn't match the agreement. He said somebody had replaced the attachments. A few minutes later, the lights went out in the underground garage."
"Did you tell your husband?"
"I intended to. Then I heard the footsteps."
Bell opened a notebook. "Let's reconstruct the sequence carefully. What time was the conversation? Who else was there?"
Clara closed her eyes and pictured the terrace outside the meeting room. The lawyer had been a quiet man named Martin Pell. Beside him stood a woman carrying a file box marked NORTH QUAY. Pell had said, 'The public sheet is a decoy. The true schedule is in the annex.' The woman had asked whether Carretti knew. Pell answered, 'Not yet. His wife may have heard us.'
Clara opened her eyes. "They said my name without saying it."
"That's useful to record," Bell said. "But a memory is not proof that the conversation caused the attack. We'll keep them separate."
By afternoon, a detective and an independent forensic technician arrived at the estate. Dominic stayed in his office while Clara guided them through the upstairs corridor. The device was not a conventional camera at all. It was a small wireless lens connected to a power source behind the molding. The technician documented it and secured it for analysis. A second device was found near the staircase, aimed toward Clara's usual route from the dressing room.
"This wasn't installed today," the technician said. "The paint around the molding has settled. We can estimate installation after examining the fasteners."
Clara remembered the summer renovations, the painters, the crew supervisor who addressed everyone except her by name. She asked that the work orders be collected.
When the investigators left, Leo produced the service request that had supposedly authorized the green-jacketed technician. It carried Dominic's electronic signature and a date three weeks before the portrait.
"I didn't sign this," Dominic said.
"It came from your internal account," Leo replied.
"That doesn't mean I signed it."
"And it doesn't mean somebody hacked it," Clara said. "We need to know who could use that account."
Dominic looked at her. "You're right."
She was beginning to hate how rare that sentence had once been.
The next evening Anton delivered original images and camera metadata to Bell's office. One frame showed the false technician leaning toward a man standing partly outside the image. The second man wore a navy tie embroidered with a tiny silver anchor—the emblem of the North Quay negotiating team. Bell asked Anton whether he had changed the image. He showed her the original file on his memory card and watched her create a verified copy.
"I wish I'd stopped him," Anton said.
"He wasn't doing anything obviously threatening," Clara answered. "I didn't stop him either."
"But you recognized him?"
She stared at the cropped photograph. Not the face. The boots. Black leather, thick soles, a little loop of white stitching at each heel.
"I recognized his shoes," she whispered.
Anton looked toward Bell. Clara felt a sudden jolt of fear but also something sturdier: the knowledge that she could describe what she had seen without guessing the rest.
That night, Dominic came to her door carrying the photographs in a sealed envelope. He did not enter.
"I thought you should know," he said, "the hotel gave the investigators a partial garage recording. One man walked into the stairwell three minutes before you were hurt. His badge was registered to a contractor named Owen Firth."
"Who hired him?"
"The request names Leo's department."
Clara felt a chill unrelated to October. "Does Leo know?"
"He knows his department's name is on it. He says he has never heard of Owen Firth."
"Do you believe him?"
Dominic considered the question for several seconds. "I believe I've trusted people without checking because I wanted their loyalty to be simple. I can't afford to do that anymore."
Clara accepted the envelope. Beneath the photographs lay a copy of the contractor's entry pass.
Its emergency contact listed a name she recognized from the peace meeting.
Martin Pell.
The lawyer who had said the annex was the real agreement.
She put the papers on the dressing table and went to the window. On the lawn below, men in dark coats patrolled between pools of garden light. She had spent years mistaking the visible signs of security for safety. Yet the most frightening thing about the portrait had not been the camera. It had been the skill with which someone had learned her movements.
In the morning she would ask Bell to request personnel records for the renovation crew, not because she expected every worker to be guilty but because the camera had been installed by somebody with access. She would ask to view the original schedule from the hotel and compare it with the service pass. She would also tell the detective about the woman carrying the NORTH QUAY box. Clara's memories might be incomplete, but they belonged in the evidence alongside the records that could confirm or contradict them.
She held the glove in her right hand. Its embroidered pearls caught the light. The garment had been chosen by her husband's mother, ostensibly because it completed the formal portrait. Clara wondered whether the woman had seen the cast when helping adjust the cuff. She might have. The more urgent question was whether she had thought it was safe to ask.
At the doorway Dominic appeared again. "Would you like me to find another place to sleep?" he asked.
"Why?"
"Because I don't want you to feel watched in your own room. Not by cameras. Not by me."
Clara considered him for a long moment. "Stay in the next room tonight. I need space to think."
May you like
"All right."
She had expected a negotiation. Instead he left, and the absence of an argument felt almost as unfamiliar as the pain in her arm. She sat down beside the window, opened the notebook Bell had given her, and wrote the name Martin Pell at the top of a clean page.
