Chapter 7 — Owen Fitch

Conrad Vane's assistant had taken two weeks' leave after the gala and had returned to the gallery — now operating under emergency management pending the estate proceedings — on a Monday. He was twenty-eight, with the slightly strung-out quality of someone who had been very close to someone powerful and was now adjusting to the gravitational change.He met Priya in one of the gallery's smaller offices, a room off the main floor that held the administrative machinery of the operation: filing cabinets, a large monitor, a printer, stacks of documents with the organized chaos of a desk in active use.Owen Fitch had been with Conrad for four years. He had seen, in that time, a great deal. This was visible in the way he sat — the specific posture of someone who knew more than they'd been asked and was waiting to find out what the question was."Mr. Fitch," Priya said. "I want to ask you about the three days before the gala. Mr. Vane's behavior, his schedule, anything that seemed out of the ordinary."Owen looked at his hands. "He was tense," he said. "Which was not unusual before a large event, but this was different. He made calls from the private conference room, which he only did when he didn't want me to hear. He had a meeting with Carolyn Marsh on the Tuesday before the gala that wasn't on the calendar. I found out because she arrived while he was on a call and I had to hold her in the reception for twenty minutes." He paused. "She looked like she'd rather be anywhere else.""Did you hear any of the call?""Not the content. I could hear the tone. He was — direct. Which meant he was telling someone something they didn't want to hear."Priya made a note. "And Ms. Hartwell — did she and Mr. Vane interact differently in those three days?"Owen was quiet for a moment that was its own kind of answer. "They had lunch on the Wednesday. The day before the gala. Which they did sometimes — it wasn't unusual. But he came back from it—" He stopped."What?""I've worked for Conrad Vane for four years," Owen said. "I knew his moods well enough to navigate them. When he came back from that lunch, he was — resolved. Like something had been decided." He paused. "I thought it was a gallery decision. A business thing. He got like that when he'd made a final call on something difficult."Priya wrote: Wednesday lunch. Elise and Conrad. He seemed resolved."One more thing," she said. "The evening of the gala. You were watching Mr. Vane when he went to the terrace.""Yes.""Why?"Owen looked at her. "Because he was upset," he said. "I'd been watching him all evening. He had — I told you he seemed resolved after Wednesday. But at the gala, around eight-thirty, that changed. He got a text. He read it, and the resolution was gone. He looked—" He searched for the word. "Caught.""Caught," Priya repeated."Like something he'd planned wasn't going the way he'd planned." Owen paused. "And then about fifteen minutes later he went to the terrace.""Do you know what the text said?""No. His phone was — his phone is in evidence, I assume."It was. She had the phone records. She had not yet looked at the eight-thirty timestamp carefully.She drove directly back to the precinct.— ◆ —The text at 8:31 PM was from a number registered to a prepaid carrier. Untraceable in the standard sense, which was itself a piece of information — people who used prepaid phones for specific communications were choosing not to be traced.The message was four words: It's done. No going back.Priya read this six times.It's done. No going back.Something had been done. And Conrad Vane — who had seemed resolved after Wednesday's lunch — had looked, upon reading this, caught. Like something he'd planned wasn't going the way he'd planned.She thought about what could be done that was irreversible.She thought about a folded program in an interior breast pocket.She thought about one to two hours.At 8:31, Conrad Vane had been alive for eighty minutes since accepting the program. He would be dead in sixteen more.If the text was from whoever had prepared the program — It's done — then by 8:31, whatever had been applied to the paper had already been delivering its dose for eighty minutes. There was no going back. The text was not a warning. It was a statement of fact.She stared at the four words.And thought: was it sent to Conrad? Or had Conrad's phone been used to receive a message meant to confirm something to someone else?She pulled up the phone records again. She looked at what Conrad had been doing at 8:31.He hadn't responded to the text. No reply sent.Because he'd read it and understood it and known he was out of time.