Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Luca
The room is glass and concrete. It screams government with its drab colors, a camera in the corner that blips with a green light every few seconds, and ugly carpet that likely hasn’t been cleaned in ages.
Two deputy marshals post at the door and there are likely more behind the glass. They don’t even pretend to be doing something else.
They’re watching me.
Roberto claims a chair. Elena stands opposite him with a file already open, tabs organized in every color.
The pretrial tech is a thirty-something in a button-down with rolled sleeves and a badge on a lanyard.
He has my ankle in his hands and a little diagnostic puck the size of a matchbox pressed to the transmitter.
He’s nervous, and his hands are shaking a bit.
“Leave event at oh-one-twenty-two,” the tech says, eyes on the laptop. “Device reported outside municipal polygon for twenty-one seconds, then re-acquired inside.”
“Outside the city,” Elena says, flat. She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She’s pinning Roberto with a look. “His conditions bar leaving the city without prior approval.”
Roberto spreads his hands, the picture of patience. “It’s false. It pinged wrong. My client was at home all night.”
“So you say. That remains to be seen. According to the ankle monitor, Mr. Conti took a midnight stroll outside the city limits,” she says. “We’re here to see if that’s true.”
The tech taps the keyboard. The wall monitor wakes up to a map—gray tiles, a bright blue circle for my house, a red dot jumping across a faint line, and then snapping back. A timestamp in the corner.
“Of course it’s true,” Robert says, getting irritated now. “We’ve already said that it’s false. Your faulty equipment is the problem here. Not my client.”
The tech doesn’t look up. There’s a bead of sweat on his forehead. “Strap integrity is good. No tamper flags. Battery healthy. Firmware current. I’m not seeing an obvious fault.”
Elena’s pen taps once against the folder. “So the hardware behaved as designed and still shows Mr. Conti outside the city.”
“That’s what the log shows,” the tech says. He toggles another screen. The same red blip hops the line and snaps back. “Outside polygon for twenty-one seconds, then inside again. Regular heartbeat before and after.”
Roberto leans back, eyes narrowed. “Your machine’s fine, therefore my client isn’t? That’s the leap you’re making?”
Elena doesn’t rise to it. “I’m making no leaps, Counselor. A condition reads, ‘Do not leave the city without prior permission.’ The system recorded leaving the city. We verify. That’s all.”
“You dragged my client out of his home at 2:00 in the morning in cuffs for verification?”
“There were no cuffs, Mr. Conti,” Elena says mildly. “He was brought in to be present for a check. Standard.”
“Well, he’s here, and now you’re accusing him of violating the conditions of his release,” Roberto says.
Despite it being nearly 4:00 now, Elena is dressed as professionally as I’ve ever seen her. Her dark hair is pinned back neatly, not a hair out of place. Her suit today is a deep blue, fitting her as if it were made for her.
She looks like she’s been up for hours.
The exhaustion in her eyes says otherwise.
“Mr. Conti,” she says. This time her eyes flick to me, quick and sharp. “Where were you between oh-one-hundred and oh-two-hundred this morning?”
I don’t answer her. Not yet. The tech pries at the strap with a proprietary screwdriver and clicks the transmitter out of its cradle. I feel the absence, a cool ring where the monitor has been sitting for two weeks.
“We shouldn’t be asking my client to speak while you’re still diagnosing a device failure,” Roberto cuts in. “But since you asked—home. He was home. All night. I can give you three flavors of proof by lunch.”
“What flavors?” Elena says.
“Guests,” Roberto says. “Security video. Gate logs. Staff. Take your pick.”
“All of them,” she says.
“After we confirm whether your equipment tripped over its own shoelaces,” he shoots back.
The tech speaks up again. “Device shows healthy battery, normal strap tension. No cut alert,” he narrates, half for me, half for the room. “Confirmed. No tamper flag. Overnight signal quality… hm. Spiky.”
“‘Hm,’” Roberto says, dry as dust. “Very reassuring.”
I let him do the outrage thing. It fits him so well.
Elena flips a tab and sets a one-page order flat on the table with a finger on the relevant line.
“Condition Ten,” she recites, not reading because she doesn’t need to.
“Do not leave the city without prior permission of the Court. We enforce plain language. If the system says you left, we examine and preserve.”
Roberto leans in, smooth as silk. “And when the system says ‘just kidding,’ we write that down too.”
“We do,” she says. “Along with what we did to make sure it doesn’t say ‘just kidding’ again. I’ll need your flavors of proof anyway. If I have to explain this to a judge in a week, I am not standing there empty-handed with ‘spiky’ as the reason.”
Roberto’s mouth twitched. Though I’ve been away for eleven years, I can read Roberto’s expressions just as well as I ever could.
He can’t help but like the young prosecutor as well. He won’t admit it, but he’s enjoying verbally sparring with her.
“All on a drive,” Roberto says, tapping his case. “Exported by the vendor.”
“I don’t want a curated highlight reel,” Elena says, putting her hand out.
“Raw footage.” Roberto puts the drive in her hand. “Door cams, stair landing, lot entrance. All time-stamped. A chain-of-custody letter from the vendor. Happy?”
“Take a lot more than that to make me happy.” She looks up at the tech. “Any chance this is mapping drift?”
The tech shakes his head, finally meeting her eyes.
He’s steadier when he gets to explain. “If I had multipath or a tower handoff, I’d expect to see elevated error and a sloppy breadcrumb.
I don’t. The breadcrumb is clean—the point hops the boundary and returns.
Strap says it didn’t move. GPS says it did.
Without a cut or a tamper flag, the system assumes GPS. ”
Roberto snorts. “So the system sides with the sky over the strap. Wonderful.”
“It’s how it’s designed,” the tech says.
“Yeah, designed by you people. Who’s to say someone here isn’t messing with it on purpose?” Roberto accuses.
Elena ignores him. “Mr. Conti,” she says, eyes back on me. “Were you at home between oh-one-hundred and oh-two-hundred?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Anyone see you at oh-one-twenty-two?”
“We had guests until well past that time,” Roberto answers. “All will confirm that my client was inside his home, well within city boundaries, at the time of this false event.”
“I’m going to run a strap tension self-test,” the tech says. “If the strap was too loose, the accelerometer might miss low movement, and GPS dominates. He could have crossed a line on a porch and—”
Elena cuts that off with a small shake of her head. “He lives well inside the line.”
“Correct,” Roberto says. “The edge of his land is still within the city by a healthy margin. The only way he left the city in twenty-one seconds is if he sprouted wings.”
The tech lifts his hands. “I’m just telling you what the machine is reporting.”
Elena sets the drive down on the table. “We’re not taking action without corroboration,” she says. “But I’m not writing ‘no violation’ on the strength of an affidavit and a smile. I’ll take the video, the logs, guest names, staff names, and we’ll compare timestamps with your raw device data.”
Roberto taps the printed map on the wall. “And when the comparison shows your clean little red dot ‘leaving the city’ while the foyer camera shows my client walking past a grandfather clock, you’re going to write a note that says what this is: system anomaly, no action, no violation.”
“You’ll get ‘no action based on anomaly verified by independent evidence,’” she says, even. “I’m not pretending the ping didn’t happen.”
“You’re not pretending your toy is faulty,” he fires back.
The tech clears his throat. “It’s not a glitch. It’s a conflict of inputs. The algorithm weights GPS. If you want me to change the weighting for this unit at night, I can—”
“You’ll do nothing unilaterally,” Elena says without looking at him.
“And while we’re on ‘unilateral,’” Roberto says, “I want it in your notes that Pretrial dragged my client out of his house at 2:00 in the morning based on a dot. You want cooperation, you get cooperation. You want compliance, you get compliance. What you don’t get is to pin this on my client when there’s reasonable doubt. ”
The tech keeps talking, filling the room with numbers that none of us can understand.
“I can pull satellite counts and tower IDs for that window,” he says.
“We’ll see if it was a handoff on the edge.
We can also add a home base—an overnight beacon that tethers the strap to a fixed point.
If he’s inside, the base confirms and reduces acceptance of a GPS bounce. ”
Elena turns to him. “Schedule the base for today.”
He nods quickly. “Yes, ma’am.”
Roberto tips his chin at the drive. “Chain of custody?”
Elena looks to the closer marshal. “Log it and walk it up to evidence. I want a copy pulling in ten.”
The marshal steps in, gloved, takes the drive. The tech disconnects the puck from my transmitter and clicks the unit back into place around my ankle. The ring warms against my skin.
“We’re done with the physical,” the tech says. “I’ll go upstairs and start the pull on the raw. You’ll get the report and the beacon install order by email.” He hesitates, then adds, “There’s a consent form for placing the base at your residence. Someone needs to sign.”
Roberto stands and smooths his tie. “I’ll sign it.”
They both move toward the door. The marshal with the drive steps out first. The other stays posted in the hall, shoulder to the frame.
Roberto glances back at me. “Two minutes,” he says, then to Elena, “You’ll write clean.”
“I always do,” she says.
They disappear into the hall.
The door doesn’t quite close on the way out. It swings lazily and stops short of latching. A soft gap, an inch of hallway, a sliver of their boots.
The second marshal takes two steps away to answer a radio squawk. The room goes quiet, and the air thickens.
It’s just us.
Elena’s eyes go to the map on the monitor as if she can will the dot to behave. For a breath, she doesn’t acknowledge it. Then she does, a half-turn, the file still open in her hand, tabs like little flags.
“You’re going to get the base,” she says, matter-of-fact. Not a question.
“I am.”
“It will help.”
“It will make your dot lie less,” I say.
A corner of her mouth twitches, like she’s going to say something, then settles.
“How was dinner?” I ask, like I’m asking about the weather.
Her eyes flick to the green camera light and back to me. That one glance says what she won’t: not for the record.
So, she didn’t report our call as she said she would.
It pleases me. More than it should.
A lot more.
“Edible,” she says, neutral.
“That’s it?” I murmur, too quiet for the camera. “Edible?”
“Fine,” she says after a beat, conceding an inch. “It was good.”
“If it’s your mamma’s,” I murmur, “why don’t you know it? Didn’t she teach you?”
The change in her face is small and subtle. But I know it immediately. Something tightens around her eyes, then smooths out just as quickly.
I wish I could take the question back. I don’t. I need the answer. I don’t know why, only that I do.
“She tried,” Elena says, voice even. “I was busy being a teenager. Friends. Boys. I thought there’d be more time.”
“How old were you when—”
“Fifteen,” she says. “It was fast.”
I feel it sit heavily on my chest, the way grief always does. The room we’re in is still ugly and carpeted, impersonal, but for just a second, she’s just a girl missing her mother.
It makes me think of Carlotta and my own children. How Lucia wasn’t there when her mother left.
How we’d never get another chance.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it in a way I don’t often.
Her eyes come up to me like she’s checking for mockery. She doesn’t find any. She nods once, and that’s all.
She turns a page in the file she isn’t reading. I shift in the chair. The strap settles warm against my ankle. We’re closer than we should be—her hip almost in line with my knee, where she leans against the table’s corner. If I moved my hand three inches, I could touch the fabric at her wrist.
She glances at the gap in the door, the green camera blink, then back down at the table. The hall is still silent as it’s too early for even the early risers.
But still, in this room, it feels like a little pocket that’s just ours.
“You want to know something stupid?” she says, so soft it might not be for me.
“Yes.”
“I kept hearing her voice.” Her thumb taps the folder’s edge, once. “That line about the dough feeling like an earlobe. I wanted to tell her it was a terrible unit of measure. I wished so hard for her to be there, just so I could tell her that it makes no sense.”
“Would she have laughed or gotten angry?” I murmur.
“She would’ve laughed,” Elena says. “She had a great laugh. Big and contagious. You couldn’t be mad at her when she laughed.”
The quick breath she takes says it’s too much right now. She looks away, just a flick, then back.
“Don’t do that,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Be… kind.” It sounds like she’s forcing the words out. “It complicates things.”
I could tell her I don’t do kind. It would be a lie. I did it once, all the way to the end. The ache of that is a familiar weight I carry like a watch.
I want to tell her I don’t do kind. It’s not necessarily a lie, but it would be one right now.
“I’ll try to refrain,” I say.
She lets out a half-smile. “Good.”
The space between us shrinks. She leans a fraction more against the table, and the hem of her jacket shifts.
A strand of hair has escaped her pin, and it rests against her forehead.
I have the stupid, dangerous urge to tuck it back.
To feel if it’s as soft as it looks. To see if her eyes widen when my fingers graze her skin.
I don’t move. I hold still like a man who has spent years learning the art of discipline.
I’ve never wanted to give in more.
Footsteps stomp down the hall, and Elena eases back just a fraction. We don’t jump apart because we haven’t technically moved together. But I feel the absence when she straightens, the little separation of heat from heat.
The door hinges squeal.
She lifts the file. “Mr. Conti,” she says, back to the script.
Roberto’s voice fills the room. “Beacon consent signed, raw data coming down. We done?”
Elena’s eyes stay on mine one half second longer than they should. Then she turns, crisp. “For now.”
I watch her go because I don’t know how not to. When the door finally closes and the latch takes, the room returns to glass and carpet and government. The green light keeps blinking like it didn’t miss a thing.