Chapter 5 - THE GREENHOUSE LOCKBOX
Footsteps echoed on the stone stairs above the wine racks—three sets of heavy leather soles descending into the cellar.
Luca, Arthur Sterling, and Dante.
And Dante had a suppressed automatic pistol tucked inside his suit jacket.
If Luca reached the camera monitor in the cellar office ten feet away, he would see immediately that we hadn’t gone out the alley door—he would see Dante standing in the third-floor study with Sterling’s courier five minutes ago. And the instant Luca saw that screen, Dante would shoot him in the back before Luca could even turn around.
“Stay behind the Bordeaux racks with Leo,” I whispered to Rosa.
I didn’t wait for her to stop me. I slipped around the end of the limestone archway leading toward the cellar office just as Luca reached the bottom of the stairs ahead of Sterling and Dante.
Dante was already reaching inside his lapel for the grip of his gun while Luca’s back was turned toward the security monitors.
“Mr. Moretti, look behind you!” I shouted.
Luca didn’t freeze and he didn’t ask a question. A man who had survived thirty-four years with the last name Moretti moved on pure instinct.
He dropped into a crouch and pivoted left at the exact second Dante pulled the black pistol from his jacket.
Instead of firing at Luca, Dante swung the barrel toward the archway where I stood—and Luca drove a heavy silver-topped walking stick from the umbrella stand by the stairs straight across Dante’s wrist.
Crack.
The gun went spinning across the stone floor, sliding under a pallet of wooden wine crates. Before Dante could lunge for it, Luca grabbed him by the collar and slammed his head against the brick archway so hard the bodyguard crumpled to his knees, dazed and groaning.
At the top of the cellar stairs, Vanessa screamed.
Councilman Sterling backed up two steps, his hand flying to his chest as Luca picked up the suppressed pistol from the stones and leveled it straight between Sterling’s eyes.
“Dante?” Luca breathed, looking down at the man who had eaten at his table for eight years, then up at his fiancée’s father. “My own head of security, Arthur? In my house?”
“He doesn’t work for me, Luca!” Sterling stammered, his hands raised. “Your maid let someone into the third-floor study! Check her pockets—she’s got the key from your safe!”
Rosa stepped out from behind the Bordeaux racks, holding Leo firmly against her side.
“She has the key because I gave it to her, Luca,” Rosa said calmly. “And Dante has the Coast Guard manifest for Pier 14 inside his left breast pocket—signed by Arthur Sterling’s shipping company.”
Luca kept the pistol trained on Sterling while he reached down with his free hand, yanked open Dante’s suit jacket, and pulled out the laminated Coast Guard folder I had seen the courier hand him upstairs.
Luca read the top line in one glance. The color drained from his face, leaving something terrifying and marble-cold in its place.
“Pier 14,” Luca whispered. “That’s the slip where my brother Marco’s boat was moored the night the fuel line blew.”
“Uncle Luca?” Leo said softly from behind Rosa’s coat. “Did Dante break my dad’s boat?”
Luca closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them, he looked at me.
“Emma. Take Mama Rosa and Leo into the cellar office and lock the steel security door. Call Detective Vance at the First District—his number is on the red speed-dial button on my desk.”
“No!” I stepped forward, shaking my head so hard my hair came loose from its pins. “Mr. Moretti, you cannot call the police yet! If Arthur Sterling doesn’t call his brother at Lakeshore Rehab by ten o’clock tonight, they’re going to kill my father!”
Luca lowered the gun half an inch, staring at me. “Your father? What does your father have to do with Arthur?”
I pulled the 1998 Polaroid from my apron pocket and held it out to him.
Luca took the photograph. He looked at the image of his mother Elena standing beside my mother in the greenhouse, then flipped it over and read my mother’s name: Clara Reed.
“My father is Thomas Reed,” I said, my voice shaking with everything I had held back all night. “He was your father’s driver twenty-six years ago when Arthur Sterling murdered your mother by switching her heart medicine. And seven months ago, my dad was working night security at Belmont Harbor when he saw who rigged your brother Marco’s boat—right before someone gave him a near-fatal stroke in the guard shack. Right now, Vanessa’s uncle has my dad locked in a fourth-floor room at Lakeshore Rehab with an IV line in his arm!”
Luca looked from the Polaroid in his hand to Vanessa standing at the top of the stairs in her red silk engagement dress.
For a moment, nobody in the cellar breathed.
Then Vanessa backed away toward the kitchen door, her voice shrill with panic. “You can’t prove any of that, Luca! An old photograph from twenty-six years ago doesn’t prove a thing, and by the time you drive across town to Lakeshore, my uncle will have discharged Thomas Reed to a hospice in Indiana! Let my father and me walk out the front door right now, or you’ll never find out which clinic he’s in!”
Before Luca could move up the steps, Vanessa yanked the heavy oak cellar door shut from the kitchen side and threw the iron deadbolt across it.
Clank.
Simultaneously, the overhead lights in the wine cellar snapped off as someone pulled the main breaker switch in the kitchen pantry.
“She’s going for the greenhouse!” Rosa cried in the dark, grabbing my arm as the green emergency exit light flickered on above the wine racks. “Sterling saw me stop by the greenhouse when I walked up the driveway tonight! If she gets that steel lockbox out of the mahogany desk before we do, she’ll destroy your mother’s pill bottle and the coroner’s tape!”
“The storm bulkhead!” Luca barked, shoving the groaning Dante inside the concrete wine vault and sliding the iron grate lock shut.
Luca scooped seven-year-old Leo up into his left arm, grabbed a heavy iron crowbar from the tool rack beside the boiler, and kicked open the wooden storm doors at the back of the cellar that led straight up into the snow-dusted garden behind the mansion.
I ran right behind him, holding Rosa’s hand as we burst out into the freezing Chicago night air.
Across the manicured lawn, fifty yards away, the glass roof of the Victorian greenhouse glowed dimly under the security floodlights.
May you like
Vanessa’s red silk dress flashed inside the glass doors as she used a heavy terra-cotta flowerpot to smash open the drawer of the old mahogany potting desk.
And pulling up to the back wrought-iron alley gate right behind the greenhouse was the white Lakeshore Rehab medical van—with two men jumping out of the cab and my father’s wheelchair strapped visible through the rear window glass.
