Chapter 4 - The Peephole Photo
Elena didn't scream. She turned the glowing screen of her cracked phone toward Dante.
Dante took one look at the two men standing in the hallway of her Queens apartment building and didn't waste a breath questioning her. He looked at Marcus.
"Call Sal at the Queens depot," Dante ordered, already walking toward the ballroom doors. "Tell him he has four minutes to put six men on the third floor of 412 Steinway Street. Nobody leaves that hallway with the child, and nobody touches the girl sitting with her."
"On it," Marcus said, his phone already at his ear as he broke into a run toward the front entrance.
Elena had to jog to keep up with Dante's long stride across the marble foyer. Behind them, Vanessa's high heels clicked frantically against the stone, while Richard Whitmore followed at a stiffer, more controlled pace.
"Dante, stop this madness!" Vanessa called out, grabbing at his tuxedo sleeve as they reached the grand portico. "You are leaving our engagement party with a housemaid? If you walk down those steps with her, we are finished!"
Dante stopped at the open door of the black armored Maybach idling at the curb. Rain had begun to fall, slicking the cobblestones of the driveway and reflecting the amber carriage lamps of the estate.
He looked down at Vanessa's manicured hand on his sleeve until she slowly let go.
"Your father sent two private extraction agents to a working-class apartment in Queens twenty minutes before his guard conveniently 'discovered' my brother's watch in her locker," Dante said. "Which means the men were already parked outside her building while Elena was still serving champagne in my ballroom."
He shifted his dark eyes past Vanessa to Richard Whitmore, who stood under the portico pillars out of the rain.
"If anything happens to that little girl before I reach Queens, Richard, the engagement won't be the only thing that's finished."
"Dante, listen to reason," Richard said, descending two steps, his silver hair gleaming under the porch lights. "I didn't plant the watch. That must have been Vanessa's foolishness with the maid. As for the apartment—when my compliance people flagged the hospital transfer three days ago, they noticed an irregularity in the household background check. The woman who gave birth to that child seven years ago was Clara Vega. A bartender who worked at the Red Hook pier the night Luca's brakes failed."
Elena grabbed the edge of the car door.
Clara Vega. Her younger sister by different fathers—the laughing, reckless twenty-two-year-old who had come home in the middle of a November rainstorm seven years ago, six months pregnant, terrified, and refusing to say the father's name before a pulmonary embolism took her life on the delivery table three months later.
"Clara wasn't a thief or a criminal," Elena said fiercely, rain plastering her dark hair to her temples. "She worked two jobs and died three hours after Sofia was born. I raised Sofia from the day she came home from the nursery!"
"And Clara Vega was questioned by my men the morning after Luca's crash," Dante said slowly, turning back to Elena with a look that made her stomach drop. "She swore to my face she hadn't seen my brother all week."
"Because she was scared of whoever killed him!" Elena shot back.
"Get in the car," Dante told her.
Elena climbed into the back of the Maybach without waiting a second longer. Dante got in beside her, slamming the heavy door against Vanessa's furious voice, while Marcus slid into the front passenger seat beside the driver.
As the car surged down the long gravel drive and out through the iron gates onto the wet parkway, Elena dialed Carla's number with trembling fingers.
It went straight to voicemail.
She tried again. Voicemail.
"They jammed the cell repeater in the stairwell," Marcus said from the front seat, watching a GPS tracker on his tablet. "Standard corporate security kit. Sal's crew is ninety seconds out."
Elena pressed her knuckles against her mouth, staring out at the blurred red taillights on the Queensboro Bridge approach. Her mother was lying in a hospital bed at St. Jude's with a blocked artery, and Sofia was in a two-bedroom walk-up with a seventeen-year-old girl and a chain lock that could be kicked through with one boot.
"Tell me about the coat," Dante said beside her.
In the dim blue ambient light of the cabin, his face looked carved from granite, yet he took his folded linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her so she could wipe the rain from her cheeks.
"Clara wore it the night she came to our apartment," Elena said, her voice tight as she clutched the damp wool coat on her lap. "November fourteenth. She was shivering so hard her teeth were clicking. She told me and my mother she'd quit her job at the Red Hook lounge and needed to stay inside for a few months. She never went outdoors again before the baby came."
Dante held up the silver Saint Christopher medal and the laminated bus terminal tag.
"This medal was mine," Dante said quietly. "I gave it to Luca when he turned eighteen. He never took it off. If Clara had it in her pocket along with a bus tag written in his hand, he didn't die alone on that bridge at midnight."
"What are you saying?" Elena whispered.
"The police pulled his burned sedan out of the East River at two in the morning," Dante said. "The medical examiner identified him by his collarbones and the gold watch caught on the steering column. I buried a closed casket."
Elena looked at the gold watch still resting in Dante's palm.
"If the watch was in the river on the steering column," she said slowly, her watchmaker's mind suddenly catching the flaw she had missed in the ballroom, "how did it survive without saltwater corrosion inside the brass gears?"
Dante stopped.
He looked down at the Patek Philippe in his hand.
When Elena had opened the back casing three days ago to free the jammed chime tooth, the tiny steel screws and brass balance wheel had been completely clean—not a single pit of rust or brine residue anywhere inside.
Before Dante could answer, Marcus's radio crackled sharply from the dashboard.
"Boss, we're on the third floor at Steinway Street," a breathless voice came through the speaker. "Whitmore's two guys are laid out in the hallway—somebody got to them before we did. The apartment door's open. The teenage babysitter is tied to a kitchen chair, unhurt."
Elena lunged forward against her seatbelt. "Where is Sofia?! Where is my little girl?!"
"The kid's gone, Boss," Sal's voice crackled back. "Wait—the babysitter says it wasn't Whitmore's men who took her. She says a woman in a hospital uniform walked in through the fire escape, showed the little girl a drawing of a wooden boat, and the kid ran right into her arms."
Elena froze, the blood roaring in her ears.
"A hospital uniform?" she whispered. "My mother's nurse at St. Jude's?"
May you like
"No," Dante said, staring at the message that had just appeared on Marcus's tablet screen—a security still captured from the apartment lobby camera three minutes ago.
Walking out the back courtyard door, holding six-year-old Sofia's hand while the child carried her stuffed rabbit, was Mrs. Alvarez—the sixty-year-old head housekeeper from Dante's estate, with the white bandage completely gone from her perfectly uninjured wrist.
