As I slowed to a stop, I counted four live oaks between the house and the curb. Clean sightlines to the street would be impossible. It was beautiful, but tactically, it was a disaster.
Cream-painted wood siding covered Dominic St. Clair’s mansion. A second-floor balcony ran the width of the façade, and gas lanterns still burned on either side of the entrance. One of the tall windows had been patched overnight, with plastic sheeting taped over an upper pane from the inside.
The house had a composure to it, a settled confidence. The broken pane looked wrong.
I knocked twice and stepped back. The man who opened the door was not Dominic St. Clair.
He was early thirties, lean but fit, a body built for movement. He wore a white linen shirt with sleeves pushed up to the elbows. His dark hair was slightly out of place, still rumpled from sleep.
“Thiago Reyes,” I said.
“Luca Moreau. I run Dominic’s household. Come in.”
I followed him inside. The house smelled of coffee, old paper, and a hint of gunpowder. The parlor’s marble floor was worn to a low matte finish. A console table held a neatly stacked pile of correspondence.
I caught up with Luca at the entrance to the salon. “He’s already awake. He was near this piano when the shot came, reviewing the ‘Saints’ score. Somehow, in the confusion, the note arrived.”
It was the most precise situational briefing I’d ever received from a civilian.
“Thank you.”
Luca stepped to the side. “He’s in there.”
Tall, silver-haired, in dark trousers and a cream-colored linen shirt, Dominic stood sipping coffee. He turned toward me and held out a hand.
I shook it. His grip was steady, and I looked into his wide-awake blue eyes.
He said, “I’ve spent fifty years teaching orchestras that safe performances rarely honor the music. I need you to understand that.”
He laid down his terms without compromise.
“Understood,” I said.
My initial sweep took forty minutes.
Ground floor first, then the courtyard, and then the upper levels. A window in the back hallway was unlatched, looking out onto a narrow passage between the house and the property wall. Nothing dramatic about it. The latch was old and required upward pressure before it seated.
I closed it without comment.
The rear courtyard presented problems. Its walls were eight feet of old brick, with mortar worn and crumbled enough in places to provide grips for someone patient and purposeful. The largest lemon tree, one rooted in the ground unlike the others in pots, stretched to within arm’s reach of the second-floor balcony. From that balcony, you had clean sightlines down into the kitchen.
The courtyard also did something strange with sound.
Manhattan buildings funnel noise upward, creating a kind of vertical acoustic awareness. This space gathered sound and held it. Standing beside the fountain, I heard the house without seeing it: Luca’s footsteps in the kitchen and a shutter on the third floor shifting in the breeze.
I photographed the wall, the tree, and the balcony. When I re-entered the house, I passed the kitchen doorway. A pot was going on the stove already, hints of garlic and bay drifting intothe air. Luca was standing at the counter with his back to the hallway, working through something on his phone.
Returning to the salon, I examined everything more closely. The shot had entered through the upper pane of the window at a slightly upward angle. I stood at the entry point and sighted along its path with my arm extended until the geometry snapped into place. The bullet had traveled through the room and buried itself in the plaster above the Steinway.
High. Well above any standing person.
I crouched and sighted again, measuring the precise angle.
Someone was standing outside at ground level, or even further away, crouching or lying down.
I considered the options.
You don’t fire a warning shot into a house without knowing precisely where your target is standing, and you don’t know that without watching him. I stood and looked at the piano bench.
