Chapter 7 - THREE PEOPLE IN THE HALLWAY
Dante did not confront Carmen after seeing the image.
It was harder than he expected. For nearly two decades, she had been part of his home. She knew how he took his coffee, what flowers he brought to his mother's grave, and why he avoided the upstairs nursery where his younger sister had once slept. Confronting her felt like accusing someone from his own childhood.
But the police needed her account before anyone else told her what had been recovered.
Detective Ortiz invited Carmen back for another interview. She showed her a still image from the restored camera, without describing what investigators thought it meant.
Carmen stared at it.
“I remember,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“Beatrice called me into the hallway. She said she wanted the champagne service moved so the guests wouldn't overhear a private conversation. Esteban was there with Valeria's purse. I asked why he had it. He said he'd found it on the floor and was taking it back.”
“Did you see him put anything inside?”
“No. His body was turned away. But Beatrice asked me to distract Valeria while he returned it to her chair.”
“Why didn't you mention the hallway?”
“I was ashamed. I thought people would believe I was helping them.”
“Were you?”
“I followed an instruction. I didn't understand it. Later, when Lucía said she saw him put something in the purse, I knew I might have helped.”
Ortiz allowed a long silence.
“Is there anything else you haven't told us?”
Carmen took a breath. “Beatrice gave me a pink envelope that afternoon. She said it contained a thank-you card for Valeria. I put it on the side table. I never opened it.”
“Where is it now?”
“I don't know.”
Investigators searched the side table's contents and found the envelope in a drawer. It held a note from Beatrice thanking Valeria for supporting the foundation. But a second sheet inside listed talking points for a press announcement portraying Valeria as emotionally unstable and unable to continue in a public role.
The document was dated two days before the engagement party.
It was a plan for a scandal that had not yet happened.
Ortiz preserved the note and compared its language with the statement Esteban's lawyers had issued. Several phrases matched closely, though that alone would not establish criminal responsibility. It did, however, suggest coordination.
The restored camera gave investigators one more clue. Esteban's wrist moved near the opening of the handbag, but the angle did not show what passed from his hand into it. The footage supported Lucía's account that he had handled the purse, contradicting his public claim that he had merely moved it away from spilled liquid. It did not establish precisely when the syringe was placed inside.
The detectives sought a warrant for Esteban's communications and worked with the laboratory to compare physical evidence. They also interviewed guests who had been near Valeria when she became dizzy. A woman in a violet dress remembered Esteban handing Valeria a champagne flute, then briefly turning his back to the crowd. She had not seen him add anything to the drink.
As the evidence grew, so did the pressure on the witnesses.
Teresa's hospital supervisor received a formal complaint accusing her of mishandling restricted medication. Her attorney challenged it with time records and messages showing she was home ill on the relevant date. Isabel's workplace suspension remained in place while the access logs were reviewed. Lucía began having nightmares, and Isabel arranged counseling through a community service rather than relying exclusively on anything funded by Dante.
Dante offered to pay. Isabel thanked him but insisted the arrangement stay independent. He respected that.
“Your daughter is brave,” he said when they met at the lawyer's office.
“She is seven,” Isabel replied. “I don't want bravery to become her job.”
He nodded. “It won't.”
Lucía, sitting nearby with her crayons, looked up.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Of course,” Dante said.
“I don't like when people call me a hero.”
“Then I won't.”
“Sometimes grown-ups say that when they want me to tell the story again.”
He felt ashamed. “You don't have to tell it again to me.”
She returned to coloring. Their conversation had been brief, but it stayed with him. He was accustomed to praising loyalty and courage. Lucía needed something simpler: adults who believed her without demanding she relive the frightening moment whenever it was useful.
That evening, Valeria attended her first independent review session as a witness. She described the missing consent records and the patients whose families had asked for help. She did not identify children by name outside confidential proceedings. She produced emails showing she had requested a pause in research enrollment before the engagement party.
One board member asked whether she had opposed the acquisition because she disliked Esteban personally.
“No,” she answered. “I opposed approving it without resolving the consent concerns. I would have made the same recommendation regardless of who ran the company.”
Another asked why she had continued preparing for her engagement while believing the foundation had mishandled medical records.
“Because a wedding and a medical compliance review are different responsibilities,” she said. “I didn't believe celebrating one meant I could ignore the other.”
Dante watched from the back of the room. Her answer was steady. He felt proud of her, but pride was not the same as relief. He knew the investigation could still hurt them both.
At the end of the hearing, Helen approached him with an urgent message from federal agents. They had obtained communications between Esteban and Beatrice. One message mentioned Valeria's drink and the need for a medical incident that could be portrayed as personal instability. Another discussed a syringe to be placed in her handbag so that, if discovered, it would suggest improper access to medication.
Dante read the summary carefully.
“Does this prove she administered it?”
“Not alone,” Helen said. “But the investigators have more. They expect to speak with both of them soon.”
That afternoon, Ortiz showed Lucía's earlier account to an experienced child interviewer. The interviewer noted that the girl's descriptions had remained largely consistent, but warned that repeated informal questions by adults could unintentionally change the way she remembered details. The investigators therefore relied on the original recorded interview rather than requesting a new story every time another document surfaced.
Isabel was grateful. “She asked me why everybody wants to know about the shiny buttons,” she told the interviewer. “I told her she's already answered.”
“That's helpful,” the interviewer replied. “Tell her the grown-ups are working on it. And let her talk about school, drawings and ordinary things.”
At the Moretti residence, Marco reviewed the security arrangements after learning that someone had used the foundation office to access the camera maintenance system. He discovered several old administrative permissions that had never been removed after employees changed roles. The technical team disabled them, documented the changes and preserved a record of the original access. Marco disliked acknowledging a failure in his department, but he understood that pretending there had been no weakness would leave the household vulnerable.
Dante praised the corrective action without turning it into a ceremony. “I want records that show what happened, including our mistakes,” he said. “Not records that make us look infallible.”
That evening, Valeria spoke by telephone with a mother who had contacted the advocacy office about her child's study enrollment. The mother did not want to disclose details to Dante's family. Valeria put her in touch with an independent patient representative and explained that she could ask questions without agreeing to an interview. Afterward she sat at her kitchen table, exhausted by how many people were afraid of consequences simply for requesting their own records.
Dante arrived with dinner and found her staring at a blank page. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Not really,” she said. “But I don't need you to make that feeling disappear.” He sat down beside her. They ate in silence until she was ready to speak.
His phone rang before he could answer.
It was Beatrice.
“Dante,” she said, voice trembling, “I need you to come to your mother's garden. Alone.”
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The investigators also revisited the physical arrangement of the ballroom with the event coordinator. A camera angle that seemed to show Esteban beside the purse was partly blocked by the floral display, so Ortiz ordered a reconstruction using photographs taken before the party. The coordinator explained which tables and stands had been moved during the reception. The reconstruction helped narrow the time window without pretending that a blurred image showed more than it did. For Dante, the patience of the process was maddening. For the people accused or threatened, it was essential. He reminded himself that the purpose of an investigation was not to validate his anger but to establish what had happened.
The reconstruction also established that the purse had been moved twice before the collapse, once by an attendant and later by Esteban. Ortiz instructed the investigators to distinguish those movements carefully in the final report. She did not want a jury to mistake a suspicious act for a proven conclusion. Dante disliked the uncertainty but accepted it. The truth was worth more than a convenient accusation.
