He looked at the garden. “Don’t report it yet.” He hung up. He sat with it for a while, the specific quality of this kind of silence, the kind that settles over you when something you half knew becomes something you can’t unknow.
He had suspected things about Celestine. Not this. Not this exactly. But he had sensed, in the way that people sense things they don’t want to name, that certain elements of their relationship existed in a register he couldn’t fully read.
Her interest in his schedule, her careful questions about the IPO timeline, the way she’d positioned herself in conversations with his attorneys.
He hadn’t named it because naming it would have required him to accept that he’d been careless.
And Callaway Briggs did not make careless mistakes. Except, apparently, he did. [clears throat] He went to the security room at midnight.
DeMarco was there. He lived on the estate. And the two of them sat in front of the monitor bank without speaking while Callaway navigated to the outdoor garden camera feed.
The timestamp he needed was early in the party, between 1:30 and 1:50 p.m., the window when the entrees had been plated and served.
He found Celestine on camera at 1:44 p.m. He watched it four times. The angle wasn’t perfect.
Garden cameras were positioned for perimeter security, not table-side surveillance, but it was enough. Enough to see the turn of her body, the deliberate shift away from his sight line, the movement of her right hand beneath the table’s edge, the motion that lasted approximately 3 seconds and changed everything.
“Do you want me to” DeMarco started. “No,” Callaway said. “Not yet. I need to think.”
He rewound the feed, watched it again, and then, in the corner of the frame, he saw something else, a figure in a blue uniform standing at the service station near the east side of the garden.
He could see her clearly, better than he could see Celestine because she was standing rather than seated, and the camera angle caught her full on.
Young, focused, her eyes tracking the head table with the particular attention of someone who was watching something that wasn’t her business and deciding whether to make it her business.
He watched her across the garden in eight steps. He watched her arm shoot forward, her gloved hand on the table’s edge, the way her body angled itself directly toward him like an arrow, like something with direction.
