Chapter 7 - The Man Who Didn't Die There

The basement safe room smelled of concrete and old coffee.

Elias arrived twenty minutes after the shooting stopped, his shirt changed, his knuckles raw. Four guards were wounded. One attacker had been captured. The others vanished before police sirens reached the street.

“They wanted something in my room,” Giata said before he could speak.

Elias looked at her. “I heard.”

“What blue case?”

“I don't know.”

“You never know the things that matter.”

Marisol showed him the lion-ring photograph and the threat. This time he studied them without interrupting. She told him about Dominic in the pantry, her father calling ahead, and the song Lena had played.

“You had evidence and kept it from me,” he said.

“Last time I trusted your family, my father ended up in a coffin.”

His expression hardened. “You think I ordered his death?”

“I think you built a house where people are afraid to tell the truth.”

Silence stretched between them. Then Elias handed back the photograph.

“Find out what you can,” he said. “But keep Giata out of the line of fire.”

“She was already there before I arrived.”

The next morning Marisol met Nia Brooks at a twenty-four-hour diner near the river. Nia wore a baseball cap, drank cold coffee, and kept checking the window.

“I found the lab tech who processed your father's blood,” she said. “Hospital sample was clean. The drunk-driving result came from a different tube.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I have copies. Not originals. Someone leaned on the lab and the police.”

Marisol slid over the photo of Dominic's ring. Nia's mouth tightened.

“I've seen that man at city fundraisers. He never pays for his own drinks.”

Nia pushed a yellowed ambulance report across the table. On it, Mateo Reyes's name was printed above one line that had been crossed out.

PATIENT CONSCIOUS. SPEAKING. PULSE STABLE.

Marisol read it twice. “They told us he died at the scene.”

“He didn't,” Nia said. “Your father was alive when they took him to Mercy Hospital.”

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“Then what happened?”

Nia looked toward the door. “That's the part they paid everyone to forget.”