Chapter 86: Not Deliberately

"Did they kill my father?"

Alexander looked at him.

The Chief Investigator didn’t answer immediately, which somehow made the silence worse.

Finally, he said, "Not deliberately."

Giovanni’s expression didn’t change.

"What does that mean?"

"It means we haven’t found evidence that Jeremy or Martin planned your father’s accident, sabotaged anything specifically because Matteo Mercer would be using it, or intended for him to die."

That should’ve sounded like good news.

It didn’t.

Giovanni already knew there was more.

"But?"

The Chief Investigator opened another folder.

"But we have evidence connecting them to the maintenance irregularities we’ve been investigating. Work that was certified despite not being properly completed. Records that didn’t match what was actually done."

Giovanni’s jaw tightened.

"So they didn’t kill him."

"Not in the way you’re asking."

That distinction mattered.

Unfortunately, it didn’t make what followed much better.

The accident hadn’t been some carefully planned assassination waiting years to be uncovered. Matteo Mercer hadn’t been targeted because Jeremy or Martin wanted him dead.

He’d simply been the person unfortunate enough to suffer the consequences of something they had already been doing.

Making money.

Cutting corners where nobody was supposed to notice.

Then certifying work as though nothing were wrong.

Matteo’s death had changed everything.

Before the accident, the falsified records had been a way to make money. Afterward, those same records could help establish why a man had died.

"And that’s when the threats started," Alexander said quietly.

The Chief Investigator nodded.

Lenny Arceo hadn’t needed to know everything. He only needed to possess something that contradicted the official paperwork.

The original maintenance checklist.

Once Jeremy and Martin realized records like that still existed, protecting themselves became more important than whatever had originally motivated the fraud.

Giovanni stared at the folder.

"Did either of them admit responsibility?"

"No."

That, at least, didn’t surprise him.

"Jeremy blamed the people actually performing the maintenance. Martin claimed he wasn’t involved closely enough to know what had been done. Both denied knowing there was a serious safety problem before the accident."

"And you believe them?"

"I believe the evidence."

Giovanni looked up.

The Chief Investigator met his eyes.

"And right now, the evidence tells us they were involved in the fraud and what happened afterward. It doesn’t prove they intended to kill Matteo Mercer."

For years, Giovanni had probably imagined that finding the people responsible would eventually produce something cleaner.

A motive.

A culprit.

Someone he could point to and say, You killed my father.

Instead, he’d gotten something considerably uglier.

People who might never have wanted Matteo dead at all.

They’d simply been willing to endanger people they didn’t expect to know.

His father happened to become one of them.

Alexander thought that answered everything.

Then he remembered the messages.

"Wait."

The Chief Investigator, already closing a folder, stopped.

"How did Martin get our numbers?"

That earned him an unexpectedly long silence.

Alexander frowned.

"What?"

The investigator looked almost embarrassed for someone else.

"That answer required significantly less investigative brilliance."

Apparently, Martin found the cellphone.

Not from a Vance employee or some highly trained security specialist. He’d simply been paying enough attention to recognize a car he’d seen Dominic Sebastian get into before. What caught his attention was a brown box being carried into the trunk.

So Martin followed the car until it stopped at a gas station. It took them a while to fill the tank, and when they left, the guy forgot his phone on the table near the gas pump.

Martin took advantage of the opportunity.

At that point, he couldn’t have known whether the phone contained anything useful. He only knew its owner worked closely enough with Dominic Sebastian to drive him around.

That alone made it worth taking.

The real gift came when Martin discovered a passcode didn’t even protect the phone.

The contact list was saved under complete names.

First name and surname.

Practically a directory of people Martin had already been trying to reach.

Alexander stared.

"Whose phone?"

The investigator referred to his file.

"Blond man."

Alexander’s eyes narrowed.

Giovanni went completely still.

There couldn’t possibly be that many careless blond men orbiting the Sebastian family who happened to possess Alexander’s private number.

"Andrew."

The Chief Investigator closed the folder.

"Yes."

Alexander rubbed his forehead.

Of course it was Andrew.

After weeks of suspicious photographs, anonymous warnings, old corporate records, and everything they’d uncovered about Matteo Mercer’s death, one of the great mysteries had apparently come down to Andrew leaving his phone somewhere stupid.

Some things really didn’t require a criminal mastermind.

The Chief Investigator gathered the remaining reports.

"Martin’s biggest mistake was Elias."

Giovanni looked at him. "He would’ve been better off doing nothing."

"Much better."

Because Elias hadn’t known enough when Alexander hired him.

Martin had supplied the missing reason to remember.

His photographs made Alexander suspicious, while his threats made Elias wonder why anyone cared about his old employment at Calderon. Then Martin tried to disguise everything as another part of the Vance-Sebastian feud, only for the recipients to eventually compare what they’d received.

The people he’d wanted looking in different directions had finally looked at him instead.

After that, Giovanni had remarkably little left to do.

Elias gave his formal statement and surrendered every threatening message he’d received. Gerald supplied Martin’s employment records, while Lenny Arceo testified about the threats following Matteo’s death and finally handed over the original maintenance checklist he’d protected for decades.

Matteo’s journals were authenticated.

They compared old company records against the maintenance reports.

And whatever Jeremy and Martin still refused to admit no longer depended entirely on their willingness to speak.

That, Alexander supposed, was what the Chief Investigator had meant.

They’d stopped asking them to confess.

Everything went where it belonged after that.

To investigators and prosecutors, along with the lawyers responsible for protecting the companies affected.

Not to Giovanni’s desk.

Not to Alexander’s.

The authorities could determine what charges remained legally available and what the evidence could still support given the time that had passed.

For Giovanni, that distinction mattered more than he’d expected.

Giovanni had spent most of his adult life knowing there were things about his father’s death he still didn’t understand. He’d learned to live without those answers, even if he’d never quite stopped wanting them.

But few questions remained now.

More importantly, they were no longer his alone to answer.

His father’s death was finally a case.

A real one.

And with the truth finally in the authorities’ hands, nothing remained that required Giovanni Mercer to hunt anyone personally.