The Briggs estate had a private lab contact. Callaway had discovered this necessity 3 years ago after a business dinner where he suspected, correctly as it turned out, that a competitor had sent someone to tamper with the water supply at a negotiation retreat.
He kept the contact’s number in his personal phone, not his work phone, under the name Dr.
Fenwick Golf. It was the kind of precaution that felt paranoid until it didn’t. He made the call from his private study on the estate’s second floor while the engagement party continued below him, the string quartet’s melody drifting up through the open window like a polite fiction.
He could hear Celestine’s laugh carrying above the crowd, that signature laugh, bright and perfectly measured, the one she deployed at parties the way other people used punctuation.
He stood at the window and listened to it while he waited for the lab to confirm receipt of the plate, which he had quietly passed to his head of security, DeMarco, with instructions that would have been career-ending for DeMarco to repeat to anyone.
“Cover it. Don’t touch the food itself. Seal it, bag it, send it to Fenwick tonight.
Tell no one.” DeMarco had looked at him the way a man looks when he understands that the ground under a situation is less stable than it appeared.
Then he’d nodded and left without a word. That was why Callaway kept DeMarco. The party ended at 7:00.
By 7:30, the last guest had been walked to their car. The catering company was breaking down tables, and Celestine had moved through the goodbyes with the smooth efficiency of someone crossing items off an invisible list.
She’d kissed him on the cheek at the door of the study, smelling of champagne and gardenias, and told him she was exhausted in a way that sounded like a cue for him to insist she stay.
He hadn’t insisted. She’d gone to her car with a smile that didn’t waver, and he’d watched the taillights of her black Mercedes disappear down the estate’s private drive, and he’d stood there in the quiet driveway for a long moment before going back inside.
He spent the evening in the study. He didn’t eat. At 11:47 p.m., his phone buzzed.
Dr. Fenwick Golf. He picked up on the first ring. “Tell me,” he said. The pause before Fenwick spoke was 3 seconds long.
Callaway counted them. “Zolpidem,” Fenwick said, “high concentration. The kind of dose that would have put a man your size down for 6 to 8 hours minimum.
Rapid onset, maybe 15 minutes depending on how much you consumed.” Another pause. “Callaway, this wasn’t an accident.
That concentration doesn’t end up in food by accident.” Callaway said nothing. Outside his window, the garden was dark and silent.
The white tablecloths had been folded away. The fountain had been shut off for the night, its basin still and black.
“I’ll need to report this to” “Not yet,” Callaway said. “Callaway, not yet, Fenwick. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
