Chapter 22 Thiago #2
Henri kept going. “I chose someone carrying her own injury because it suited my purpose. I told myself the injury had been placed there by Dominic, and all I was doing was uncovering it.” He swallowed. “But that is not how honest people behave.”
No one spoke.
Henri’s hands were still folded. I noticed then that the knuckles on his right hand had gone white with pressure.
“I spent twenty years resenting what I believed Dominic had done,” he said quietly. “And in the end I became a monster, too.”
Dominic shook his head once.
“No,” he said.
Henri looked at him.
“You did something terrible,” Dominic said. “And you failed. But that doesn’t make you the same as the man you spent twenty years resenting.”
Dominic’s voice remained steady and low.
“You don’t become someone else simply because you did something cruel once. And you don’t escape it because you suffered first. Pain doesn’t excuse harm. And understanding what you did afterward doesn’t repair it.”
He held Henri’s gaze.
“You chose to hurt people. I didn’t. That’s the difference.”
It was one of the most severe things I had ever heard him say. Henri absorbed it without answering.
A detective stepped in, carrying a legal pad and a folder. He took the empty chair near the door. He fired off procedural questions. Names. Dates. Clarifications.
Henri answered.
Yes, the letter to Bridget had been delivered by hand.
Yes, he had cultivated her over time.
Yes, he had known Gerald Tureaud could facilitate quiet access to Orpheum administrative spaces without understanding the larger design.
No, he had not intended mass casualties.
The detective asked when he first understood that a weapon would be used. Henri took longer with that one.
“When Micah was introduced into the plan,” he said. “When a man whose usefulness depended on physical proximity and backstage access became necessary.”
The detective wrote that down.
“And you continued?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Henri looked up with visible irritation. “The concert had to take place. It was necessary to change the ending and take away my humiliation by correcting the record.”
That answer was more useful than the others. A man who fears humiliation can be made to do extraordinary damage while still telling himself he is acting on principle.
The detective asked three more questions. When he was done, he closed the folder and stood.
“We’ll need a formal statement this afternoon,” he said.
Henri nodded.
The detective looked at Dominic. “Five more minutes.”
The detective stepped back out. The officer remained. Dominic stood.
The motion made Henri lift his head quickly. “I didn’t take your place,” Dominic said.
No one moved.
“I stepped into a moment. That’s all any of us did.” His hands hung quietly at his sides. “You prepared the ground. You made the calls, and you gathered the people. That was you.”
Henri stared at him.
“The city doesn’t know it,” Dominic said. “And I failed to say so for twenty years.”
He continued to look at Henri.
“I am sorry for that,” he said.
Henri’s composure failed again, this time not around the eyes but in the throat. A muscle moved once beneath the skin.
Dominic waited.
Henri lowered his gaze to the table. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before. “I thought the myth was too comfortable for you to surrender.”
“It often wasn’t comfortable,” Dominic said.
Dominic turned and walked toward the door. Luca moved at once, coming around behind my chair. I looked up at him.
“One minute,” he said quietly.
Dominic stepped into the corridor. For a moment, Henri and I were alone in the room, if you did not count Luca behind me and the camera in the corner.
“Who told you?” Henri asked.
My shoulder throbbed in a heavier, more deliberate way. The medication was wearing off. I adjusted slightly in the chair.
“That it was inside the circle?” I asked.
He nodded.
“A person who reads rooms instead of sightlines.”
Recognition settled in for Henri. He gave a very small nod and then looked at Luca. “He saw her first.”
“He saw the changes,” I said. “Before I knew what I was looking at.”
Henri leaned back slightly in his chair.
“You were prepared for the balcony,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But not for the stage.”
“No.”
He looked at the brace on my arm. “Then he was right,” Henri said.
“Who?”
“The one who reads rooms.”
Henri had spent months building a plan around the assumption that people trained like me would look outward first. He had not been wrong.
The visible line of threat was clean. The gunshot at the house, altered baton, and shifted stage mark.
Everything pointed toward perimeter and spectacle, most likely in the balcony.
He built a decoy threat for me to follow while the real one, at stage level, hid behind it.
Henri looked at me. “You moved the podium when Micah was absent.”
“Yes.”
“Not far,” he said.
“Far enough.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“The shot was built for one position,” he said.
“Yes.”
“When the mark changed, he had to adjust.”
“Yes.”
Henri looked down at his folded hands again.
“And in the end, the hesitation gave you the opening.”
“In the end, watching both the balcony and the inner circle of the stage destroyed your plan.”
The door opened. The detective with the folder returned. I addressed him.
“The gunshot at the house was the opening move.”
He looked at me.
“It established the wrong threat model. A sniper. Distance. Balcony sightlines.”
He waited.
“Everything that followed reinforced that assumption. The baton replacement proved someone could reach Dominic personally. The stage mark moved him into a clean line from the balcony, and the flash device made everyone look up.”
I paused.
“While the actual weapon was already on the stage.”
The detective glanced down at his notes.
“Micah.”
“Yes. He controlled the podium. He controlled the spike tape. If Dominic stood in the wrong place, Micah was the man who moved him back. In a room full of musicians and donors and security, the stagehand with the podium is invisible. No one questions why he’s standing two feet from the conductor.”
“So the balcony was never the attack vector?”
“It was always a distraction.”
Luca set a hand lightly on the back of my chair. “Time to go.” As he turned the chair toward the door, I looked back once.
Henri remained seated with his hands folded in front of him. He did not look at the detective or the camera. He looked at the empty chair where Dominic had been.
Dominic stood a few feet away with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other resting lightly against the wall beside him. He looked at my face, then at Luca’s, reading what he could without asking for an immediate report.
“Well?”
“He talked,” I said.
We moved down the corridor together.
The wheels hummed softly over the tiles. My shoulder had settled into a deep, constant ache. At the elevator, Luca reached past me to press the button.
Luca helped me back into the SUV. My shoulder protested the transfer sharply enough this time that I closed my eyes for a second.
Dominic noticed. “Back to the hospital,” he said.
Traffic crawled for a block and then cleared.
The city outside the window looked ordinary in the way cities do after extraordinary events. A man unloaded bags of ice from the back of a truck. Two women stood under an awning, sharing a cigarette. Streetcar rails flashed briefly in the sun where the line curved across the avenue.
I rested my head back against the seat.
At the hospital, Luca turned in the passenger seat before the detective could come around and open my door.
“You’re getting back into bed,” he said.
“I assumed so.”
“That was not an invitation to sound agreeable. I need to know you understand the plan.”
“I understand the plan,” I said.
The detective opened the door. Heat flooded in.
As Luca steadied the chair and I shifted my weight out of the car, Dominic approached me. “Mr. Reyes.”
I looked at him.
“You were useful today.”