Chapter 4
The email was not proof of anything by itself.
Grace could have scheduled it.
Someone could have accessed her account.
Or Dante’s memory could be wrong.
Rebecca refused to build conclusions around what Dante remembered from dinner fourteen months earlier.
So they verified.
The restaurant had preserved reservation and payment records.
Dante’s security logs showed when Grace entered and left.
Her phone connected to a cell tower near the restaurant at the time the email was sent.
The Arts Fund email had been sent from a desktop computer at the Moretti family office in Chicago.
Someone used Grace’s credentials.
Dante asked who had been inside.
The old access system had limited records, but two badge entries survived.
Adrian.
And Adrian’s executive assistant.
The assistant remembered the evening.
She had gone home at six.
Adrian remained.
When questioned through counsel, she also remembered something else.
“There was a woman with him.”
Dante became still.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Employee?”
“No.”
“What did she look like?”
The description was broad.
Mid-thirties.
Light hair.
Formal clothes.
The assistant had only seen her from across the office.
Rebecca did not let Dante put a name to it.
“Not yet.”
Then an old parking invoice surfaced.
The visitor’s car had been validated through Adrian’s office.
License plate data from the receipt still existed.
Rebecca’s investigator traced the registration history.
At the time, the vehicle belonged to Victoria Lane.
Dante stared at the report.
The visit occurred three months before Grace died.
Nearly a year before Adrian supposedly met Victoria at the hospital fundraiser.
Dante called neither of them.
Not yet.
Instead he asked Maria whether Grace ever mentioned Victoria.
Maria thought for several minutes.
“Not by name.”
“Anything about Adrian bringing a woman around?”
Maria’s face changed.
“One night Mrs. Moretti asked me whether anyone had used the music room while she was gone.”
“When?”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Before she died?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I didn’t know.”
“What happened after?”
“She started keeping the piano room locked.”
There it was.
A second path leading back to the same room.
Dante looked toward the piano through the open doors.
The melody.
The bench.
Victoria’s car at Adrian’s office.
May you like
Someone had spent months telling Dante that two people had only recently met.
The records were beginning to tell a different story.
