I watched him hesitate. Then Dominic wound the stem. Once. Twice.
“It’s fully wound.”
Thiago had been finishing his coffee at the counter. He didn’t sit for breakfast. He approached the table and looked at the watch without touching it.
“Problem?”
Dominic turned the watch toward him.
8:14.
“Does that mean something?”
“That was the downbeat of the final chorus,” Dominic said.
“2006?”
“Yes.”
“May I?” Thiago asked as he reached for the watch. Dominic nodded.
“Who handled it yesterday?”
Dominic shook his head. “Only me.”
I told them I’d cleared his study desk the previous evening before dinner. Stacked correspondence, moved a score he’d left open overnight, and straightened the surface. The watch had been closed and sitting in its place, to the right of his annotated scores, when I left the room.
Thiago turned the case in both hands, tilting it toward the window light. He examined the hinge and the clasp while running his thumb along the back. He handed it back to Dominic without comment.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“No scratches or tool marks.”
Dominic’s phone rang. It was a call from the orchestra manager. He retreated to the salon while I remained in the kitchen with Thiago.
I tried to wind the watch. I managed to turn the mechanism a quarter turn. It ticked once on the table, then stopped again.
Neither of us moved for a moment. Then Thiago began checking the room. He’d done it a dozen times a day since he arrived. Window latches. The doorframe. The arrangement of appliances on the counter.
There was nothing disturbed or missing. The room looked exactly as I’d left it the evening before.
He would have to check the study. Someone had entered the house, found the watch on the study desk, and damaged the watch’s mechanism enough that it froze on a chosen hour and minute, even though fully wound. Nothing else. No visible damage or signs of a search.
“They took nothing,” I said. “I’ve already been in the study once this morning, and I would have noticed.”
“They didn’t come here to take anything.” Thiago straightened, then leaned against the doorframe. “The sheet music rewrote the concert, and then the baton disrupted his way of conducting it. This is different.”
I waited.
“The first two were interference. This is a statement about knowledge.” He sat across from me at the table. “They know that timestamp. They know where his watch lives and what it means to him, and they know his habits well enough to walk in and out without leaving a trace.”
I’d thought about the gunshot, “Saints,” and the baton before I climbed out of bed. It all added up to a warning, but of what?
“This isn’t rage,” I said.
Thiago looked at me.
“Rage breaks things. This is patient.” I glanced at the watch. “They’ve been planning this for a long time.”
