Chapter 83: The Price of Silence

Lenny Arceo’s house was small but surprisingly neat.

A cat immediately abandoned one of the chairs when the strangers entered and disappeared down the hallway, apparently deciding none of them deserved further investigation.

Lenny gestured toward the living room.

"Sit."

Alexander did, while the investigator remained near the door.

Giovanni stayed standing.

For years, he’d imagined finding the man who’d been beside his father when Matteo died. Now that Lenny was sitting less than six feet away, every carefully considered question disappeared.

Only one remained.

"Did you kill my father?"

Lenny looked up.

"No."

"Did you know someone was going to?"

"No."

"Then why did you disappear?"

The older man’s eyes moved toward the window.

"Because I knew why he died."

Giovanni finally sat.

"Then tell me."

Lenny lowered his gaze to his hands.

"Your father had been checking Calderon’s maintenance records for weeks."

"Why?"

"Because things weren’t adding up."

Parts were charged but never installed, inspections were signed without anyone remembering an inspector, and equipment supposedly cleared for operation kept developing the same failures.

Matteo had noticed.

"Did he tell you?"

"That morning."

Lenny remembered standing beside the boom lift while Matteo flipped through several reports.

"After this project, we’re done with Calderon," Matteo had told him.

The contract wouldn’t be renewed. A replacement contractor was already being evaluated, and Matteo intended to conduct a deeper audit once the transition was secure.

Then the two men boarded the boom lift’s personnel platform.

The machine had been certified safe.

"I woke up in the hospital," Lenny said. "Your father didn’t."

Giovanni’s fingers curled against his knees.

"What happened afterward?"

"A man came to see me. Later, I learned he worked for Jeremy Villareal."

"Calderon’s operations manager," Alexander supplied.

Lenny nodded.

"They paid my hospital expenses. Then they offered me money."

"You took it."

"Not immediately. I told him to get out."

"What changed?"

"My family."

Lenny swallowed.

"My children were young. They knew where they went to school, where my wife worked, and where my parents lived. They said nothing I did would bring Matteo back, but if I kept asking questions, someone else might get hurt."

Giovanni stood abruptly.

"So you took the money."

"Yes."

"How much was my father’s life worth?"

Alexander rose and caught Giovanni’s forearm.

"Gio."

Lenny didn’t retreat.

"Enough to make me hate myself every time I spent any of it. But I didn’t kill your father."

"No. You just helped whoever did walk away."

"Yes."

The admission left Giovanni’s anger nowhere to go.

"If I’d talked, they threatened to kill mine too. I chose my family."

"And left me without mine."

Lenny flinched.

Nobody tried to soften the truth.

Eventually, Lenny pushed himself upright with his cane.

"I kept something."

He returned from his bedroom carrying a wooden box containing old documents protected in plastic sleeves.

"Your father gave this to me before we went up."

Giovanni accepted a maintenance checklist.

One component in the boom lift’s platform assembly was clearly flagged.

REPLACE BEFORE NEXT OPERATION.

Another document contained the final certification.

The same component was listed as replaced, inspected, and cleared for operation.

The signature belonged to Ramon Villareal, the man who later became Manuel Vera, then Martin Valdez.

Below it was another approval.

Jeremy Villareal.

Alexander moved closer.

"Father and son."

Giovanni compared the dates.

"The replacement couldn’t have happened. The part was supposedly installed before it was even requisitioned."

"That’s what Matteo noticed," Lenny said.

"He knew?"

"He knew the paperwork was wrong. I don’t think he knew how wrong."

For years, Giovanni had wondered whether his father’s confidence had finally made him careless.

Apparently not.

Matteo had discovered evidence of fraud, but the equipment still carried an official safety clearance. He hadn’t realized the people profiting from the scheme were willing to go beyond falsifying invoices.

Giovanni lowered the documents.

"Where is Ramon?"

"The last I heard, he was calling himself Martin Valdez."

"We know that."

"Then you probably know he moved around after Calderon collapsed."

"Where did he go?"

"Eventually, he went back to his father."

"Jeremy?"

"Yes. They opened a scrapyard."

The investigator immediately reached for his phone.

"A scrapyard?" Giovanni repeated.

"Martin knew equipment, and Jeremy knew where companies disposed of old parts. They started buying scrap metal and machinery."

"Name."

"Jeremy’s Junkshop."

While the investigator searched, Giovanni asked another question.

"What about Leon Calderon?"

Lenny shook his head.

"I don’t know how much he knew about what was happening in his company, but Leon was hardly ever around."

"What do you mean?"

"From what I remember, he left practically everything to Jeremy. Contracts, maintenance schedules, inspections, even dealing with clients. If something went wrong, Jeremy was the one we contacted."

"So Leon was an absentee owner."

"Pretty much. I don’t think I ever saw him visit one of our project sites."

Giovanni frowned.

"That doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved."

"No, it doesn’t," Lenny admitted. "But from what your father discovered, most of the questionable transactions had Jeremy’s approval. Ramon handled the inspections, and Jeremy signed off on the expenses."

Giovanni looked at the documents again.

Father and son.

If Leon Calderon had truly left the company’s operations entirely in Jeremy’s hands, the two men would have had plenty of opportunities to manipulate the maintenance records without attracting unwanted attention.

Of course, that didn’t necessarily make Leon innocent.

But it gave the investigators another possibility to consider.

The investigator’s phone made a soft sound.

"I found it."

Giovanni turned.

"Jeremy’s Junkshop?"

"Still operating."

"Owner?"

"Jeremy Villareal."

Giovanni looked down at the decades-old certification.

Ramon Villareal.

Jeremy Villareal.

For years, he’d been chasing the name of a company that no longer existed.

Now he finally had the names and location of the two men behind the paperwork.

Alexander seemed to know exactly what he was thinking.

"Don’t."

"I haven’t said anything."

"You don’t have to."

The investigator stood.

"We have the address, documents that may constitute new evidence, and a witness who can identify where they came from."

Lenny raised his head.

Giovanni looked at him.

"Are you willing to give a formal statement?"

Fear returned to the older man’s face.

After several seconds, he nodded.

"I should’ve given one when your father died."

Giovanni didn’t reassure him.

"Yes."

Lenny accepted that.

"Then I’ll give it now."

Alexander remained beside Giovanni as the investigator began gathering the information needed to preserve the documents properly.

"Now we do this correctly," Alexander said.

Giovanni stared at Jeremy’s address.

Part of him wanted to visit that junk shop and confront the man who’d helped destroy his family.

But finding Jeremy wasn’t the same as proving what he’d done.

And Giovanni had spent too many years searching for the truth to ruin his chance at it now.

He turned to the investigator.

"Contact my lawyers. Have everything documented and turned over to the proper authorities. Lenny’s statement too."

The investigator nodded.

"And Jeremy?"

"We don’t touch him."

For now.

Because they finally knew where the trail ended.

The next question was what Matteo had discovered that made Jeremy Villareal so desperate to stop him.