Chapter 12
At 11:38, Alessia appeared from the side entrance. She walked to the study door, paused, and went in. Her uniform was the same as it was now. She looked, on the screen, very small.
At 11:40, Bellini entered the corridor.
Then the footage skipped.
The timestamp jumped from 11:40 to 11:51.
“Eleven minutes,” Matteo said. “Gone.”
Dante watched the screen without expression. “Camera failure?”
“No. Manual deletion.”
“From where?”
“Security terminal.”
“Who has access?”
Matteo hesitated. “Me. You.” A pause. “Bellini.”
Alessia stared at the screen. She had not known that. She had not known that the man who accused her had been standing in that corridor during the missing eleven minutes, in the dark, while she was behind the curtains of the study.
Bellini hadn’t simply seen her leaving.
He had been there.
Matteo continued.
“There’s something else.”
He opened another file. A gate camera, the service entrance at the west side of the property, shot from above. At 10:52, a vehicle entered. It was dark, low, expensive. No plate was visible.
“It left at 12:03,” Matteo said.
“Who authorized it?”
The pause this time was longer.
“The authorization code belonged to Bianca Moretti.”
Silence.
Dante’s mother had been dead eleven years.
Alessia looked at him.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“No,” Dante said quietly. “It’s deliberate.”
He stood up and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to them for a long moment, and Alessia watched the light move across his shoulders and thought about the fact that his mother’s name was still a working password in a house that had buried her eleven years ago.
“Who else knew her codes?” he asked.
Matteo shook his head. “I don’t know. The system was built before my time. The codes were never rotated. Everyone who had access then might still have access now.”
“Who had access then?”
“Your father. Your uncle.” Matteo paused. “Bellini.”
Dante said nothing.
That evening, the staff were finally released.
Everyone except Bellini.
Dante ordered him to remain in the guest wing. Bellini laughed when he was told.
“You’re imprisoning me because a maid found a cufflink?”
“No.”
Dante stood in the foyer with his hands in his pockets. The chandelier was lit, and the marble floor shone, and the house looked, for all the world, exactly as it had that morning.
“I’m asking you to stay because someone used my dead mother’s security code.”