Chapter 7 - The Price of Staying
I called my landlord. No answer.
My neighbor. No answer.
My hands started shaking.
Ricardo took the phone from me. “You’re not going home.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“Someone broke into your building.”
“And your life is why they care about me.”
“That’s exactly why I’m not letting you walk out alone.”
I hated that he was right.
Leo appeared in the doorway holding the stuffed fox.
“Clara stay?”
I looked at him and felt my anger collapse into something worse.
Guilt.
“I’ll stay tonight.”
Ricardo nodded. “You’ll be paid.”
“I’m not your employee.”
“Then call it hazard pay.”
“Call it nothing.”
For the first time, the corner of his mouth almost moved.
That afternoon, Detective Lena Torres arrived. She was the first law enforcement officer Ricardo had allowed inside the house since Sofia’s death.
She listened to the recordings twice.
“Why wasn’t this turned over before?” she asked.
“Because we just found it,” Ricardo said.
Torres looked at me. “And you found the phone?”
“Leo did.”
She studied the boy’s drawing of the blue car.
Then she pulled a photograph from her file.
A blue sedan burned in a salvage yard three days after Sofia’s murder.
The registered owner was dead.
But one traffic camera had caught the driver before the car vanished.
Torres slid the grainy image across the table.
Ricardo stared at it.
I did too.
May you like
Detective Torres did not treat Ricardo like a celebrity or a monster. She treated him like a witness who might become a suspect if he lied. I liked her immediately. She asked dates twice, changed the order of questions, and watched who answered too quickly. When she asked Victor whether he had ever driven the blue sedan, his pause lasted less than a second. Torres still wrote it down.
The driver looked exactly like Marco Moretti.
