Chapter 5: What Dom Ferrara Heard
Dom Ferrara's garage smelled of motor oil and old coffee.
It was past midnight when Adrian and Harlan arrived.
The overhead lights buzzed.
Dom was waiting for them at a metal workbench — a heavyset man in his sixties with grease permanently worked into the creases of his hands.
He had not gone home when Natalie called him.
He had simply waited.
He shook Adrian's hand and held it a moment too long.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"About your wife.
I liked her.
She always brought coffee when she dropped the car off."
Adrian sat down on a stool across from him.
"Tell me about the call."
Dom pulled a stool up for himself.
Harlan stood to one side with a small recorder.
"Three years ago, two days before the accident," Dom said.
"I got a call from Mrs.
Westwood's number.
The voice said she needed to reschedule her brake service.
Said she'd call back to set a new date." He folded his hands on the workbench.
"I told the police it sounded like her.
That's what I said.
But that wasn't the whole truth."
Adrian looked at him.
"What was the whole truth?"
"It sounded almost like her.
The rhythm of it.
The way she talked.
But something was off." Dom tapped the workbench with one finger.
"Mrs.
Westwood always asked about my dog.
Every single time she called.
It was a joke between us — she'd met him once when she came in early and he was in the shop.
She called him the best mechanic I had.
Every call after that, she asked about him."
He paused.
"That call, she didn't ask."
Harlan made a note.
"I told myself I was imagining it," Dom said.
"The police had already called it an accident.
I thought — what am I going to do, tell them the caller didn't ask about my dog?
They'd think I was crazy." He looked at Adrian.
"But I've thought about it every week for three years."
"Did you record the call?" Harlan asked.
"No.
But I have the phone log.
Her number, the timestamp, the duration.
I kept everything." He reached under the workbench and produced a manila folder.
"I made copies when the police first came.
I kept the originals."
Harlan took the folder carefully.
"There's something else," Dom said.
He reached into the folder and removed a single photograph.
A still frame, slightly blurry, printed from what looked like a security camera feed.
"My exterior camera.
It covered the lot and part of the street." He set the photo on the workbench.
"This was taken two hours before that call came in."
Adrian looked at the photograph.
A car was parked across the street from the garage.
A dark sedan.
The angle was poor and the image was grainy, but the driver's window was partially down and a figure was visible inside — a woman, fair-haired, looking toward the garage.
"I didn't connect it at the time," Dom said.
"I didn't know who she was.
But I kept the footage.
I keep everything for ninety days and then I archive it." He looked at Adrian.
"After your wife d\*ed, I went back and I saved it.
I don't know why.
I just felt like I should."
Harlan was already on his phone, stepping away from the workbench.
Adrian stared at the photograph.
The image was too blurry to be certain.
But the car was the right color.
The hair was the right shade.
And the angle of the head — turned slightly toward the garage, watching, waiting — matched something he had seen a hundred times at dinner parties and charity events and family holidays.
"She came here first," Adrian said.
"She came to check your hours.
To see if you'd be open.
To make sure the appointment was real before she cancelled it."
Dom nodded slowly.
"That's what I think."
"She planned it before she made the call."
"Yes."
Adrian sat with that for a moment.
"Mr.
Ferrara." His voice was steady.
"If I had come to you three years ago — if I had asked you directly — would you have told me this?"
Dom looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
"I would have told you the same thing I told the police.
That it sounded almost like her but not quite.
That she didn't ask about the dog." He paused.
"Nobody came back to ask."
Adrian stood.
He shook Dom's hand again.
"Thank you."
"Find out what happened to her," Dom said.
"That's all I want."
Outside, the night air was cold.
Harlan was still on the phone, pacing the lot.
Adrian leaned against his car and looked up at the sky above the garage roofline.
He thought about Claire calling him from San Francisco.
*There's something I need to tell you about Madison.* He thought about the way he had said, *Tell me when I get home.* He thought about every moment between that phone call and midnight when the police knocked on his hotel room door.
He had spent three years telling himself he could not have known.
He was no longer sure that was true.
Harlan ended his call and walked over.
"The forensics team finished at the estate," he said.
"They found something in the cedar compartment.
Under the lining."
Adrian turned.
"What?"
"A USB drive." Harlan's expression was careful.
"We don't know what's on it yet.
But it was taped to the underside of the bottom panel.
Someone hid it there deliberately."
Adrian stared at him.
"Claire hid it," he said.
"That's what it looks like."
"She was building a case."
Harlan said nothing.
But his silence was its own answer.
Adrian got in the car.
He drove back to the estate with Harlan behind him, thinking about a woman who had been frightened enough to write a letter, hide a ring, tape a drive to the bottom of a secret compartment, and still get into a car on a storm-soaked road because she trusted that the brakes would hold.
She had done everything right.
May you like
And it still hadn't been enough.
Not yet.
