Chapter 12 - Rosa Delaney
Firefighters arrived in time to save the cottage's outer walls. They couldn't save Evelyn's paintings. Adrian watched the smoke rise without speaking, and Mara understood that finding evidence had cost him a second goodbye to his mother.
"We can still use what she left," Mara said.
"I know." He looked at the camera bag. "I just wish I'd believed her while she was alive."
Nell located Rosa Delaney at a retirement community in Providence. The former inspector answered her phone before dawn and knew exactly why they were calling.
"I reported a fault in the stairwell locks three weeks before the fire," Rosa said. "The doors could be controlled from the construction trailer next door. I ordered the override removed. My supervisor crossed it out."
"Why didn't you testify?" Mara asked.
"I did. The prosecutor showed me a report that said the system had been disconnected. I believed it. Years later I found out my inspection notes had been replaced."
"Do you still have them?"
Rosa hesitated. "A carbon copy. I kept it because something about the file bothered me."
The carbon showed the override order, its date, and the serial number of the control module. It matched the photograph from drawer fourteen and the unit in Adrian's camera picture.
Nell called a public-interest lawyer named Amara Holt, who agreed to seek an emergency stay of demolition. The legal filing would be stronger with a witness willing to swear the notes were genuine.
"I'll swear to it," Rosa said. "I should have done that years ago."
When they reached her building, the night manager told them someone had already checked Rosa out. A man claiming to be her nephew had picked her up twenty minutes before. He had signed the visitors' log with a false name.
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Rosa's apartment door was open. Her phone lay beside an untouched cup of tea. On the dining table someone had left a short message in black ink.
SHE SHOULD HAVE KEPT QUIET.
