“Hashtag new parent,” he says.
“Oh yeah? Is my sweet little angel of a niece not a good sleeper?”
“She sleeps great. It’s the waking up every two to three hours that’s the problem.”
I laugh. “Can’t say I envy you there. So, what’d you call for? Your voicemail was cryptic.”
“Check your email,” my older brother says, the humor going out of his voice.
“For what?” Pulling my tablet out of my jacket, I add, “Did Clayton find us a solid in with the Russians already? Damn, he’s good—”
“No. Not that. It’s something else you’ll find of interest.”
“What’s with the cloak and dagger routine? Just tell me what it is.”
“Check your email,” Dante repeats testily.
“Fine, fine.”
Frowning, I tuck the phone between my ear and my shoulder and login to my work email.
“You look at it yet?”
“Give me a damn minute,” I snap.
After scrolling past a handful of emails related to Bellanti Vineyards’ actual business operations, I find the message from my brother. It’s been CC’d to Marco and Clayton as well. Attached are a text-based document and a series of video files. My pulse picks up.
“This is a lot of files you got here,” I say.
“Yeah. Read the report first.”
Dante sighs, and the line goes silent while I read. Three pages of dense text list all the dates and times that our security system shows signs of irregularity—meaning it’s been tampered with—along with long chains of letters and numbers that I can’t interpret, maybe some kind of trace for where the commands came from. Fuck.
“Shit,” I breathe. “These dates go back at least five years. Who did this?”
“We don’t know. Now watch the video.”
“Which one?”
“Any one.”
I clench my jaw and open the first one. Grainy black-and-white footage shows a dark sedan pulling slowly into the back drive on the Bellanti property in the middle of the night. The next few videos I click on show the same exact thing happening on later dates, around the same time. I can’t make out anyone inside the vehicle, and nobody seems to enter or exit the car. It just creeps slowly down the drive, circles, and then goes back the way it came, seemingly without making physical contact with anyone.
“What is this? Someone surveilling us?” I murmur. “Maybe with high-tech audio equipment?”
“I wish that’s all it was,” Dante says darkly. “Look again, when the car makes the turn.”
I tap pause and rewind and replay a few times. Finally, I see it. The car is pulling up to the long-forgotten mailbox that we were required to put on the property because the winery has a separate address from the house. It’s never been used. At least, not by us.
“Who’s been putting shit in that box? And who the hell is picking up the delivery?” I ask.
“Don’t know. I reviewed the footage for each time the car shows up, watched the entire forty-eight hours prior for unscheduled visitors or any other notable activity, but the feed from our cameras has…blips in it. It just goes black. That’s why I pulled in a tech person to look at our security system from the back end, see if there was a system glitch. Instead, we found all that evidence of tampering.”
I can practically feel my blood pressure rising. “Why didn’t anyone catch this sooner? This report goes back five years! You’re telling me in all that time, nobody realized we had a problem?”
“Security is your job,” Dante reminds me coolly.
“Fuck, I know that. How did I miss this?”
