Chapter 4 - THE LEATHER TOOL ROLL AND THE SECURITY FOOTAGE
The screen of my phone seemed to burn my palm. I stared at the looping ten-second video clip, the breath knocked completely out of my lungs.
It was undeniably my father. Even with his face partially obscured by a faded baseball cap, I recognized the slight limp in his left leg—a souvenir from a fall he took during his second year in cell block D—and the heavy canvas jacket I had bought him for Christmas last year from a thrift store.
He swung the crowbar with a desperate, frantic energy, shattering the reinforced glass of the back service door to Victor Hart’s downtown showroom. The timestamp in the corner read 10:45 PM.
Forty-five minutes ago. Right when Dante was examining the clasp at the dining table.
“Jenna?” Dante had stopped by the driver’s side door of the SUV, noticing I hadn’t moved. He walked back to me, his brow furrowed with concern. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I couldn’t speak. If I showed Dante the video, he was legally obligated to report it. My father was on strict parole; a breaking-and-entering charge would send him back to a maximum-security prison for the rest of his life.
But if I didn’t show Dante, whoever sent this text—Victor, or someone working for him—would own me forever.
I looked up at Dante. For a billionaire who had just had his life upended, his eyes were incredibly steady. He wasn’t looking at me like a maid. He was looking at me like an equal partner in a war we had just stumbled into.
I turned my phone around and pressed play.
Dante watched the ten-second clip in silence. His jaw tightened. He didn’t gasp, and he didn’t ask me if it was fake. He just looked at the timestamp.
“Victor texted this to you?” Dante asked.
“It’s an unknown number, but it has to be him,” I whispered, my voice trembling violently. “Dante, if my dad violates his parole, they’ll lock him away forever. He’s sixty-two years old. He has a heart murmur. He won’t survive another sentence.”
“Why would your father break into Victor’s store tonight?” Dante asked, his analytical mind already dissecting the problem. “It’s been ten years. Why tonight, of all nights?”
“I don’t know!” I cried, panic finally bleeding into my voice. “He sweeps floors on the night shift! He’s supposed to be at the stamping plant! He knows the alarms at Victor’s store are hardwired to the precinct. It’s suicide!”
Dante took my phone from my hand. He didn’t reply to the text. Instead, he zoomed in on the grainy video, his eyes narrowing as he studied the framing of the shot.
“This isn’t a police security feed,” Dante said, pointing to the angle of the camera. “The CPD feeds have a digital watermark in the bottom right corner. And this camera is mounted too low—it’s at eye level, hidden in the brickwork across the alley. This is a private, closed-circuit camera. Which means the police haven’t seen this yet.”
He handed the phone back to me and opened the passenger door of the SUV.
“Get in,” Dante ordered, his voice dropping into the commanding tone he used in boardrooms. “We aren’t going to the stamping plant. We’re going to Pilsen.”
Twenty minutes later, the sleek black SUV pulled up outside a dilapidated laundromat on 18th Street. The neon sign buzzed erratically, casting a flickering pink light onto the wet pavement.
I jumped out before Dante even put the car in park and ran up the rusted iron staircase attached to the side of the brick building. I pounded on the peeling wooden door of apartment 2B.
“Dad! Dad, it’s Jenna! Open the door!”
Silence.
I reached under the frayed welcome mat, grabbed the spare key, and shoved it into the deadbolt. I threw the door open, my heart in my throat, terrified I would find the police already there, or worse.
The small, one-room apartment was dark, except for the glow of a small desk lamp in the corner.
Sitting at a battered wooden folding table, surrounded by old coffee cups and loose sheets of sketching paper, was my father.
He didn’t have his canvas jacket on. He was wearing a faded grey t-shirt, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, holding a small jeweler’s file in one hand and a piece of brass wire in the other.
He looked up, startled by the door banging open. His face, deeply lined by years of stress and prison food, softened instantly when he saw me.
“Jenna? Bear, what are you doing here? It’s past midnight.” He stood up, wincing slightly as he put weight on his bad leg. Then he saw Dante standing in the doorway behind me in a tuxedo. My father’s eyes widened in alarm. “Is something wrong? Did you lose your job?”
I ran across the room and threw my arms around him, burying my face in his shoulder. He smelled like Irish Spring soap and Folgers coffee—the same smell he’d had my entire life.
“Dad,” I sobbed, pulling back to look at his face. “Where were you an hour ago?”
“Right here,” he said, bewildered. “I called in sick to the plant tonight. My arthritis was acting up, so I stayed home to work on some wire-wrapping designs. Why?”
I pulled out my phone and showed him the video.
My father squinted at the screen. As he watched the man in the canvas jacket smash the glass door, all the color drained from his face. He sat back down heavily in his folding chair, his breathing turning shallow.
“That’s... that’s not me,” he whispered, his hands beginning to shake. “Jenna, I swear on your mother’s grave, I haven’t been within a mile of Victor’s store since the day I was arrested. But... that’s my coat. The one you bought me.”
“Where is the coat, Mr. Reed?” Dante asked, stepping fully into the small apartment and closing the door behind him. He didn’t look around the cramped, poverty-stricken room with judgment. He looked at my father with intense, focused respect.
My father swallowed hard, pointing to a plastic laundry basket near the door. “I took it to the laundromat downstairs this morning. I left it in a machine while I ran to the corner store for milk. When I came back, the machine was empty. I thought someone just stole it because it was cold out.”
Dante nodded slowly. “Someone did steal it. Someone who knows your limp, knows your build, and knows you live above a laundromat with zero security cameras.”
“Victor,” I breathed, the sheer, calculating malice of the setup making my stomach turn. “He hired someone to dress like my dad, fake a limp, and smash the door just to get it on a hidden camera. He manufactured a parole violation tonight just in case I figured out the necklace was a fake!”
“He didn’t just manufacture it tonight, Jenna,” Dante said, looking at the timestamp on the video again. “10:45 PM. Victor was sitting at my dining table at 10:45 PM. Which means he ordered this break-in to happen before you ever challenged him about the necklace.”
My father looked up, his eyes filled with a terror I hadn’t seen since the day the judge sentenced him. “Why? Why would he frame me again? I haven’t spoken to the man in ten years!”
“Because of what’s in the leather tool roll,” Dante said quietly, his eyes falling on a heavy, rolled-up piece of brown leather sitting on the bottom shelf of my father’s small bookcase.
My father froze. His hand instinctively went to his chest. “How do you know about the tool roll?”
“Because I found the $50,000 offshore bank receipt Celine claims your wife signed to keep you quiet,” Dante said. “But Jenna tells me you lost your house to pay legal fees. Which means your wife never got that money. Victor paid that money to someone else, under your wife’s name, to buy whatever is inside that tool roll.”
My father closed his eyes, a ragged sigh escaping his lips. He looked older in that moment than he ever had. Slowly, painfully, he reached down to the bottom shelf and pulled out the heavy leather roll.
He unrolled it on the folding table.
Inside weren’t pliers or files.
Tucked into the individual leather pockets were dozens of blue wax casting molds—the master templates used to create high-end jewelry.
“Victor didn’t frame me ten years ago just to cover up a few forged antique watches,” my father said, his voice thick with decades of suppressed grief. He picked up one of the blue wax molds and held it up to the light.
It was the exact mold of the folding-leaf clasp with the backward J.
“I designed the sapphire necklace, Dante,” my father said. “I designed the watches. I designed Victor’s entire award-winning 2013 collection. I was going to patent the designs and leave Victor’s shop to start my own brand. Victor found out.”
My father reached into the last pocket of the tool roll and pulled out a small, heavy object wrapped in a velvet cloth.
“When the police arrested me, they didn’t search my workbench at home. They only searched the shop. So they never found this.”
He unwrapped the velvet cloth.
Sitting in the center of the fabric was a massive, flawless blue sapphire. The exact size and cut of the center stone in Celine’s necklace.
“Victor told the police I dismantled the necklace and sold the stones,” my father said, looking at me with tears in his eyes. “But I didn’t. Because I found out the morning I was arrested that the stones Victor was selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars to his best clients... were synthetic lab-grown fakes.”
Before I could even process the revelation, Dante’s phone rang sharply in his tuxedo pocket.
Dante looked at the caller ID. It was his head of corporate security.
Dante put it on speakerphone. “Report.”
“Mr. Marino,” the gruff voice of his security chief echoed in the small apartment. “I’m sorry to call so late, but we have a massive problem. The Chicago Police just raided your downtown holding company offices. They have a warrant.”
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“A warrant for what?” Dante demanded, his spine stiffening.
“Insurance fraud, sir,” the security chief said. “Victor Hart just walked into the precinct and handed them a sworn affidavit. He claims you are the mastermind behind a ten-year jewelry forgery ring, and that you ordered him to frame Robert Reed to cover it up.”
