Chapter 4 - THE EMPTY CHAIR AT CAIO’S TABLE
Joana’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a building in Vila Mariana. The hallway smelled of fried garlic, wet laundry, and someone’s strong perfume. A child’s drawing of a football field had been taped to her front door. When we arrived with Inspector Rocha, Joana seemed startled to see Dante standing there without bodyguards filling the stairwell.
“You can come in,” she told him. “But you’ll take off your shoes. My son just cleaned the floor.”
Dante obeyed. I almost smiled at the sight of a man who commanded a mansion trying to balance on one leg while removing expensive leather shoes.
I was there because Joana had asked for me. She wanted to meet the woman who had carried food to the table where her brother died. I had dreaded the visit all morning. On the drive, the scar beside my mouth pulled whenever I swallowed, and I worried that my face would force Joana to comfort me when she had every right to be angry.
Instead she poured me coffee and asked, “Did Caio look frightened that night?”
I closed my eyes. I could still see his chair scraping the tile and his hand briefly touching Dante’s shoulder.
“He looked determined,” I said. “He smiled when he switched seats. I thought he was making a joke.”
“He made jokes when he was scared,” she replied. “Our father used to say he was laughing to keep the darkness from finding him.”
Her son, Pedro, appeared from the bedroom in a football jersey. He was nine. He looked at Dante with the open curiosity children sometimes reserve for adults everyone else is wary of.
“Are you the man from Uncle Caio’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know he could draw a horse without lifting his pencil?”
“No,” Dante said. His throat moved. “I didn’t.”
Pedro ran to get a sketchbook. While he searched, Joana showed us photographs of Caio at a birthday picnic, carrying groceries for their father, and sleeping on a sofa with Pedro curled against his shoulder. The photographs were small and ordinary. They made the empty place at the family table feel much larger than the police file had.
“Caio started investigating the foundation because a mother from Pedro’s school couldn’t get a specialist appointment that had been authorized,” Joana said. “The clinic claimed it had already paid. The specialist said she’d never seen the referral. Caio thought it was a billing mistake. Then he found three more.”
Elisa wrote down the details. “Do you know the mother’s name?”
“Lúcia Batista. She gave Caio copies. I can ask whether she’ll speak with you.”
“We would appreciate that,” Elisa said. “But please don’t ask her to share medical details publicly. We can speak privately.”
Dante looked at me. I knew what he was thinking: invoices were not abstract if a child was waiting for care. His mother’s letter had made the same point in different words.
The memory card Joana had supplied was still being examined, but its first authenticated files had provided a map of suspicious payments. A company called Vale Branco Supply had received fees for equipment several clinics reported never receiving. Another company, Vértice Serviços, had been paid for administrative support that did not appear in the actual staffing records. Silvio Braga approved the invoices. Camila’s charity office had recommended both vendors. None of that by itself proved murder, but it explained why Caio had become dangerous to certain people.
I noticed a stack of unopened mail on Joana’s kitchen counter. One envelope bore the same Vale Branco logo I had seen on boxes unloaded at the mansion’s service entrance.
“Where did that come from?” I asked.
Joana frowned. “They sent Caio a notice saying he owed them for consulting services. It arrived after the funeral.”
She handed the letter to Elisa. It claimed Caio had an unpaid balance and demanded reimbursement from his estate. Joana’s hands curled into fists.
“They’re billing my dead brother for investigating them,” she said.
Beatriz later told us the claim would need proper review, and Joana would receive independent legal support. I was relieved to see a practical response instead of another promise that Dante could make all problems disappear.
After leaving the apartment, we drove to the mansion for a carefully scheduled walkthrough of the service areas. The police had already documented the kitchen and collected samples. I was permitted to identify people and locations without touching evidence. Everything looked terribly normal. Copper pans hung above the cooking island. Fresh bread cooled on racks. A maid I knew by name polished glasses, keeping her eyes on her work until I greeted her.
“Marina,” she whispered. “We heard you’d been fired.”
“I wasn’t. I’m not working right now.”
“Camila’s office sent around a notice saying you’d behaved dishonestly.”
Dante heard her. His face darkened, but he did not interrupt. Elisa recorded the statement and asked for the notice to be preserved.
At the pantry door I pointed to the place where Caio had taken Dante’s usual seat on the fatal night.
I stopped just outside the doorway because the room looked exactly as it had that night. The polished metal shelves, the jars of spices in alphabetical order, even a yellow cloth folded near the sink were familiar. For several seconds I could not move. Elisa waited beside me rather than taking my elbow. She asked whether I wanted a short break, and I nodded. We stood at the kitchen window watching a delivery driver pull away from the service court. When I could breathe normally again, I went back inside. I wanted my statement to be accurate, and I knew accuracy sometimes required giving myself enough time to remember. Nobody accused me of wasting theirs. A serving cart had approached from the kitchen. An assistant named Tiago carried two covered plates. I remembered a small white sticker beneath the handle of one lid. At the time I had thought it was a dietary label.
“Which plate did he give Caio?” Elisa asked.
“The one with the sticker,” I said. “He looked at it before he set it down.”
“Did he know what was in it?”
“I don’t know.”
Tiago was located later that afternoon. He agreed to speak through an attorney. He said a kitchen supervisor had instructed him to follow the seating chart exactly, and he had never known the food was unsafe. His account needed verification, but it matched my memory of a nervous young man checking instructions while wealthy guests talked around him.
The police found the supervisor’s electronic work schedule. A temporary assignment had placed him on duty for a single week. That supervisor had been hired through Vértice Serviços.
“Silvio’s vendor,” I said when Elisa explained.
“Possibly connected,” she corrected gently. “We follow the records.”
Dante asked to speak with all kitchen staff. Elisa refused to let him conduct anything resembling an interrogation. He accepted that, though I could see the effort it cost. Instead he called a staff meeting with an independent workplace representative present, assured workers their jobs would not depend on taking sides, and gave them the investigator’s contact details. I had never seen him ask employees what support they needed before. Now he listened while a cook explained that people feared losing housing tied to their jobs, and a dishwasher asked whether he could have a lawyer if questioned.
I watched the answers change Dante’s face. It was one thing to claim that everyone in the mansion was family. It was another to discover how little power a worker actually had when the family turned against her.
At dusk, Camila held a press conference outside the foundation’s headquarters. She wore a cream suit and spoke about stability, charitable duty, and the need to shield vulnerable patients from scandal. She called the allegations against her false and suggested I had been paid to damage her reputation. Cameras flashed while she promised to open an internal review.
I watched the broadcast from Mrs. Almeida’s sitting room, where the curtains smelled of laundry soap and a fan rattled in the corner.
“She knows how to sound concerned,” Mrs. Almeida said.
“Maybe that’s why Dante loved her.”
Mrs. Almeida looked at me. “Sometimes people love the version of a person they’re shown. That doesn’t make the person who lied any less responsible.”
Before I could answer, my phone rang. The number was unfamiliar, but this time the caller spoke.
“Marina Oliveira?” a man asked. His breathing sounded rough. “My name is Rafael. I work at the parking garage behind the foundation. I saw a man from the news there the night Caio died.”
“What man?”
“The guard with the scar. Artur. He came with a document bag and left without it.”
My heart pounded. I motioned to Mrs. Almeida to call Elisa.
“Why are you telling me?” I asked Rafael.
“Because I gave the security footage to someone who said he worked for Montenegro. Then my manager told me to forget it. This morning my brother found our front door broken.”
“Please call the police. Don’t meet anyone alone.”
“I have something else,” he said. “The bag belonged to the man you all think is trying to stop this.”
“Whose bag?”
There was a long pause. A car horn sounded near him.
“It had BRUNO REIS stitched inside.”
The call ended.
May you like
I stared at the phone. Bruno had protected Dante for years, and he was the one who had helped uncover the seating instructions. But Artur had been carrying a bag with his name on it.
Either Bruno was hiding a part of the truth—or somebody wanted us to believe he was.
