Calvin Devereaux likely had enough knowledge of lighting placement to know exactly where a flash device would do the most damage.
Luca continued to stare at the phone. “So Calvin matters because he has the skills to stage a spectacle.”
“Yes.”
“But not necessarily a shot.”
“No.”
He handed the phone back. “Maybe the sniper line is the wrong line.”
I slipped the phone into my pocket. “Not wrong. Loud.”
He looked at me. “And you’ve been following the louder line.”
His words were true. I had spent days studying the sightline that would allow a clean shot from above. A flash device altered the picture.
If you created a sudden spectacle in the balcony, every eye in the house would lift. Security would move toward the disturbance.
At ground level, on the stage, someone would have a real opening.
I started walking again. Luca fell in beside me.
“Eamon needs this immediately,” I said.
“And Dominic.”
“Yes.”
Luca was quiet for half a block. Then, “I don’t like Calvin as the center.”
“He isn’t the center.”
“That’s right. He’s a tradesman. Useful, but he’s not the mastermind type.”
Chapter thirteen
Luca
Irotated the label maker cartridge twice before it seated properly. The walk-in closet off Dominic’s study was narrow enough that if two people stood in it, one of them had to leave before the other could turn around. Years ago, when Dominic finally admitted he had too many boxes in the salon and not enough patience for institutional creep, I had taken over the closet and turned it into a personal archive for him.
It wasn’t the orchestra’s records or foundation’s files. It was his things. Annotated scores he no longer needed within arm’s reach but refused to surrender to outside storage. Old programs. Correspondence from conductors and soloists he still cared about. Everything in the closet had a place I’d made for it.
Sunday afternoons were for maintenance when the week ahead looked ugly. Dominic was in the study pretending not to review the upcoming program notes I had already left on his desk. He had made one penciled correction to a date range and was now reading an essay on adaptive reuse in postwar Europe. Thiago was downstairs.
I relabeled one archival box, shifted another half an inch to the left, and reached automatically for the shelf of personal music materials from the 1990s. The box markedSaints / Arrangements / Private Usefelt wrong as soon as I lifted it.
It wasn’t heavier. Just different.
I set it on the narrow counter I’d installed along one wall and removed the lid.
The top folder was where it should be. It was Dominic’s early rehearsal copy from a regional festival in Baton Rouge. Under that sat a marked reduction that he used for educational work after Katrina. Beneath those, the full score from the early 1990s he had annotated for a charity performance long before Jackson Square made “Saints” belong to every camera in the city.
I pulled it out. The paper was too smooth.
Dominic’s original copy had a faint tooth to it, not rough exactly, but older, slightly weathered stock. This one was cleaner. Heavier. Newer. It was a precise reproduction of the cover, including the slight fading in the upper right corner and the small coffee ring at the bottom left. Someone had even copied the wear and tear.
I opened to the first page. The markings were Dominic’s. Narrow pencil with a slight forward slant. Breath marks above a choral cue near the second page turn. Whoever did this had gone beyond copying a score. They had copied Dominic.
