Richard Voss looked exactly like a man who had nothing to hide, which was precisely what made me watch him so closely.
I hadn’t planned to be anywhere near the second-floor sitting room when he arrived. I’d told myself I was simply bringing Lily down to the kitchen for breakfast, taking the long way through the east corridor instead of the elevator because she liked to count the paintings on the wall. But when we passed the open sitting room door and I heard his voice, low and warm, saying Ethan’s name, I stopped walking without deciding to.
Marco stood just inside the doorway, arms folded, exactly where Dominic had told him to be. Not near the door. Inside it.
Voss was kneeling by the couch where Ethan sat wrapped in a blanket, a mug of hot chocolate steaming untouched on the side table. He was an elegant man in his fifties, silver at the temples, the kind of face that photographed well at charity galas. I had seen him at the house perhaps a hundred times over the years, always pleasant, always generous with the staff at Christmas, always the first to compliment my work to Dominic within earshot of me, as if he understood exactly how much that kind of praise mattered to someone in my position.
“I came the second I heard,” Voss was saying, his voice cracking with what looked like genuine emotion. “God, Ethan. I’m so sorry. If I had been here—”
“You were here,” Ethan said quietly. “You made the toast.”
Something flickered across Voss’s face, so brief I almost convinced myself I’d imagined it.
“That’s right,” he said. “I was.”
Lily tugged at my hand. “Mommy, who’s that?”
I hushed her gently, but not gently enough. Voss turned his head toward the doorway, and for one unbearable second his eyes met mine, then dropped to the small girl beside me.
“Ah,” he said, straightening. “The famous Lily.”
My whole body went rigid.
“Word travels fast in this house,” I said carefully.
“It’s the only thing that does, these days.” He smiled, and it was a good smile, practiced and warm, the kind of smile that had probably closed a thousand business deals. “Dominic tells me she’s quite the hero.”
“She just noticed something,” I said, echoing Dominic’s own words back at him without quite meaning to.
“Noticing things,” Voss said, “is usually the hardest part.”
He crouched slightly, bringing himself down closer to Lily’s height, the way adults do with children they’re trying to charm. “Hello, Lily. I’m Richard. I’ve known your friend Ethan since before he was born.”
Lily studied him with the same unnerving directness she’d shown Dominic in the ballroom. She didn’t answer.
“She’s shy with new people,” I said quickly, tightening my grip on her hand, and steered her toward the kitchen before he could say anything else.
It wasn’t until we were halfway down the hall that I realized Lily had gone very quiet, the specific quiet she fell into whenever something was turning over in her mind.
“Sweetheart? What is it?”
She looked up at me.
“His hand smells like the cold room.”
I nearly dropped the granola bar I’d been holding.
“What do you mean?”
“Like the cake man’s box.”
My heart began to pound. “The silver box? It smelled like something?”
She nodded, very serious. “Cold. Like the fridge. And sweet.”
I crouched down in the hallway, ignoring the granola bar entirely now. “Lily, are you saying Richard smells like the man from last night?”
She considered this with the careful precision small children sometimes bring to questions they don’t fully understand the weight of.
“No,” she said finally. “His hand does.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, not completely, not yet. But I understood enough to know it needed to reach Dominic within the next five minutes, not the next five hours.
I found him in the study, alone this time, the monitors dark, the whiteboard covered now with a blanket someone had thrown over it, as if hiding the names from casual view. He looked up when I came in without knocking, something in my face apparently answering the question before he asked it.
“What happened?”
I told him. Every word, the way I’d promised myself I always would from now on, no matter how small or strange it seemed.
Dominic was quiet for a long moment; then he reached for his phone and typed something rapidly.
“Cold storage,” he said, almost to himself. “Sweet. Chemical, or food-sweet?”
“I don’t know. She’s three. That’s already more description than I thought we’d get.”
“It’s enough.” He looked up at me, and there was something new in his expression, a kind of grim focus that made him look ten years older than he had at the party. “There’s a cologne. Rare. Comes in a metal case, kept refrigerated because the formula degrades in heat. It has a distinct sweetness to it. Cedar and something like burnt sugar.”
My mouth went dry. “You know it because—”
“Because I gave a case of it to three people for Christmas two years ago.” Dominic’s jaw tightened. “Marco. Felix. And Richard.”
The same three names from the whiteboard.
“That doesn’t mean anything by itself,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I was reassuring him or myself. “Any of them could have touched that silver box last night for a hundred innocent reasons.”
“Any of them could have,” Dominic agreed. “Which is why I’m not going to accuse anyone based on the way a three-year-old describes a smell.” He stood, crossing to the window, staring down at the gardens below without really seeing them. “But I am going to find out exactly where each of those three men was standing for eleven minutes last night. And I am going to do it quietly, in a way that doesn’t warn a man who has known me for fifteen years that I’m looking at him.”
“And if it’s him?”
Dominic didn’t turn around.
“Then he made the second worst mistake of his life last night,” he said. “The first one was thinking my son’s birthday party was a safe place to do it.”
I left him there, standing at the window, and went back to find Lily, who had wandered into the kitchen on her own and was now sitting on a stool, swinging her legs, entirely unbothered by the fact that she had just become the single most important witness in what was quickly becoming a very quiet, very dangerous investigation.
It was on the way back through the east corridor, later that afternoon, that Lily stopped walking entirely.
We were passing the long wall of family photographs that ran the length of the hallway outside the private residence, dozens of framed pictures spanning what looked like three generations of Morettis. I had walked past that wall more times than I could count over six years and never once really looked at it.
Lily was staring at one photograph near the middle of the row, an old one, slightly faded, showing a much younger Dominic standing beside a group of men at what looked like a golf course, all of them laughing at something outside the frame.
She pointed.
“That’s him.”
I followed her finger. Beside young Dominic stood a younger version of Richard Voss, unmistakable even decades earlier, his arm slung easily around Dominic’s shoulders like they’d known each other their whole lives, which, I realized with a slow chill, they probably had.
“Lily,” I said carefully, kneeling beside her. “Is that the man from the cold room? From last night?”
She looked at the photograph for a long moment; then she shook her head.
“No. That’s Ethan’s dad’s friend.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Then who—”
“Him.” She pointed again, further down the row, to a photograph I hadn’t even registered, half-hidden behind a large potted plant, showing a much smaller group at what looked like a private dinner years ago. There were only four people in the frame: Dominic, a woman I assumed was his late wife, Richard Voss—and a fourth man I didn’t recognize at all, standing slightly apart from the others, his face turned just enough toward the camera to be clearly visible.
“That’s the cake man,” Lily said simply, as if she were pointing out a shape in a picture book.
I stared at the photograph, at a stranger’s face frozen mid-smile at a dinner table from what looked like ten years ago, and felt the floor of everything I thought I understood about this house tilt sharply beneath me.
Whoever had walked into that cold room last night wearing a tuxedo like he belonged there wasn’t a stranger who’d slipped in uninvited.
He was already part of the family’s history. Which meant he hadn’t needed an invitation at all.
He’d probably still had a key.
