Part Seven: How It Got There
The investigation that followed was conducted with a thoroughness that reflected both the gravity of what had been discovered and the profile of the intended victim. Within twenty-four hours, a picture had assembled itself from security footage, staff interviews, and a careful audit of the evening’s service.
Theo — the earnest seventeen-year-old bar trainee who had delivered the Scotch — was immediately and emphatically cleared. He had carried the glass from the bar to the table in the ordinary way, without incident, and his distress upon learning what had been found in it was genuine and total. He sat in a back room with a glass of water and his hands shaking and could barely speak.
The glass, it emerged, had been tampered with at the bar, in a window of approximately ninety seconds during which the senior bartender had stepped away to retrieve a bottle from the back cellar. The security footage showed a figure — a man in a dark jacket who had positioned himself at the bar as if awaiting service — who had, in those ninety seconds, leaned across the bar and reached for a glass that was already poured and waiting.
The man had been captured on three cameras. He was identified within thirty-six hours.
The motive, when it eventually became clear through the investigation, connected to a business dispute that had cost a former associate of Daniel’s a significant amount of money — a dispute that Daniel had considered resolved through legal channels and which, apparently, the other party had not. The full account of it belongs to court records rather than to this story.
What belongs to this story is what happened in the restaurant on that Tuesday night, after the forensic technician had done her work and the police had taken statements and the room had gradually, slowly, with the careful tentativeness of people who have been close to something terrible and are only beginning to fully understand it, returned to something resembling itself.
