The Last Witness

The first body was never the one the gala had promised.

Ava Reed stood just inside the gallery’s glass doors, coat still half on, when the crowd’s laughter turned sharp and wrong. Crystal chandeliers threw bright, fractured light over the marble floor, and in that light Victor Hale lay facedown near a pedestal that once held a sculpture of polished stone. The man’s tie had gone askew, his hand splayed as if he’d reached for something on the way down. Red wine had pooled at his collar and darkened into a slick that looked almost deliberate.

“Detective Reed?” The voice came from somewhere behind her shoulder, practiced and breathless. Sergeant Morales - always Morales when the department wanted a calming presence - pushed through the first ring of onlookers with two uniforms in tow. “We called it in. Security says he collapsed. Then they - ”

“They found him,” Ava said, cutting through the story before it could settle into a lie. She crouched, ignoring the heat of the crowd pressing in around her. A faint metallic tang rode the air beneath the perfume and champagne. Victor’s skin had already begun to cool. His eyes were half-open, glassy with the wrong kind of calm.

She checked the back of Victor’s head with two fingers, careful not to disturb anything she couldn’t afford to lose. A dark bruise, swelling along the hairline. She didn’t touch the bruise itself. The blow had landed hard enough to do its job quickly.

“What’s his wife doing?” Ava asked.

Morales blinked. “He doesn’t have a wife here. People are saying - ”

“I don’t care what people are saying,” Ava said. Her tone was steady, but her mind had already started mapping the room: exits, sightlines, camera placements, the places someone could vanish without breaking the spell of an event like this. “I want names of the staff who were nearest him when it happened.”

A woman in a pale, expensive gown stared at Victor as if she’d been assigned to witness this scene. Her clutch held a phone like a shield. “I was by the donor wall,” she said too quickly. “I heard… a thump. Then everyone screamed.”

Ava rose slowly, forcing her body to stop shaking with adrenaline she refused to indulge. The gallery was crowded enough that nobody’s version would be clean. That was the problem with charity gala crowds: people moved as a single organism, and when it panicked, it panicked together.

Ava stepped toward the edge of the pedestal. Someone had draped a velvet rope around the body, but it had been done in a hurry - rope already slack in places, officers already arguing where to stand. The press would smell blood before the police finished writing down the first fact.

“Get the media out,” she said. “Now.”

Morales hesitated, like he wanted to debate her authority in the middle of a murder. “They’re with the sponsors. They - ”

Ava looked at him until he understood she wasn’t asking. “Out.”

He nodded sharply and barked orders. Uniforms moved, widening the circle around Victor while trying not to trample the evidence that might be sitting in plain sight. The crowd shifted, grumbling. Cameras lifted. Someone laughed once - an absurd, high sound - before choking it off.

Ava’s gaze swept the room again, hunting not for a weapon, but for a pattern. The gala’s centerpiece display - an art piece called Tideglass - stood behind the podium where Victor had been scheduled to speak. A spotlight warmed the glass surface, making it shimmer like water. Except nobody looked at it now. Everyone’s eyes were on the body.

Victor Hale was a prominent businessman. That meant he didn’t just have enemies; he had people who wanted to look like friends while they cut his throat. Which meant the killer might not have been here for the art. They’d been here for Victor.

Ava didn’t get to decide what the killer wanted. She only got to decide what she could save.

A hand brushed her elbow. “Detective Reed.” The man who spoke had the calm of someone used to rooms like this - clean suit, silver hair, the kind of posture that said he’d never been told to wait. He offered a card, not to her, but to the air above the card, like the gesture mattered more than the contact. “I’m Liam Hart.”

Ava took in the details in one sweep: his cufflinks glinting under the chandelier light, the way his eyes flicked from Victor’s body to the security desk at the far wall. The way he didn’t look surprised. Not exactly.

“Liam Hart,” Ava repeated, letting the name anchor. “Where were you when it happened?”

He gave her a polite half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Near the donor wall. I was speaking with someone from Victor’s office. He seemed… agitated earlier. I thought he’d had too much to drink.”

Ava’s attention snagged on the lie. “You thought he’d had too much to drink. Yet you came over the moment I arrived.”

“I didn’t know you were here until Sergeant Morales waved you through.” Liam’s voice stayed even, but his fingers tightened around the card. “I didn’t want the police to miss anything.”

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