Chương 9 - What They Thought They Took
Luca’s men detained Marco in the office.
I sat on the hallway floor because my legs wouldn’t hold me.
For eleven years, my father’s voice had been hidden in a jacket.
We had found it.
Then lost it in less than an hour.
Luca crouched beside me.
“There’s a copy.”
“On the laptop.”
“Yes.”
“On a laptop Marco used.”
He stood immediately.
We went back to the sitting room.
The laptop was open.
A transfer window had been replaced by a blank desktop.
The copied files were gone.
Luca swore under his breath.
I picked up the computer.
“Don’t touch anything.”
He looked at me.
“You know how to recover them?”
“No.
But deleting something and making it disappear aren’t always the same.”
At the hotel, technicians had recovered recordings after guests unplugged equipment.
I didn’t know their methods.
I knew enough to stop people making things worse.
Hannah Reed arrived with a digital evidence specialist named Ben Ortiz.
He photographed the laptop, recorded its condition, and made a forensic copy before doing anything else.
While he worked, Hannah listened to my account.
No interruptions.
No promises about how easy it would be.
“You’ll need to give a statement,” she said.
“I will.”
“Your mother, too.”
“She will.”
Luca stood near the window.
Hannah turned to him.
“And your records need to be preserved.
All of them.
Even the ones that may hurt you.”
He looked at me.
Then back at her.
“Understood.”
Ben recovered three audio files from the laptop.
The damaged fourth file remained unusable.
But the recovery gave us something Marco hadn’t known existed.
A file list from the original card.
One item had been marked hidden.
An image.
Marco’s first copy had included it even though nobody opened it.
Ben brought it up.
A photograph of a handwritten ledger.
Dates.
Property addresses.
Payments.
At the bottom was a line in my father’s handwriting.
Original kept where the measuring tape ends.
My mother’s sewing tin.
I reached for my phone.
Then stopped.
If Adrian was monitoring calls, asking about the tin would tell him where to look.
I called my mother and asked about an old dress.
She understood after the second question.
“That hem’s still folded,” she said.
“Nobody has opened it.”
I exhaled.
Then I sent Vanessa a message.
Tell Adrian he stole the wrong thing.
She answered almost immediately.
He wants to meet you.
Under it came a second line.
May you like
Tomorrow morning.
Your mother’s shop.
