Chapter 7 - THE MARINA LOGBOOK
Vanessa didn’t look at my father. She stared down at the flagstones where her red silk engagement dress was soaked in melted snow and mud, her chest rising and falling in jagged breaths.
“He’s had a stroke, Luca,” Vanessa whispered, though all the arrogance had drained out of her voice, leaving only a thin, desperate whine. “He can’t even speak in full sentences. You’re going to believe a brain-damaged night watchman over the woman who has stood beside you for two years?”
Luca unfolded the laminated Belmont Harbor security log my father had kept hidden inside his cardigan lining for seven months.
Under the security floodlights of the garden, I read the faded carbon-copy lines over Luca’s shoulder.
Every vehicle that entered the private south jetty at Belmont Harbor after midnight had its license plate recorded by the gate camera and initialed by the guard on duty—T. Reed.
On August 14, two years ago, at 2:15 AM—three hours before Marco Moretti took his cruiser out onto Lake Michigan for a dawn fishing trip and never came back—two cars had entered the south jetty.
The first was a black Cadillac Escalade registered to Dante Rossi.
The second was a white Porsche Cayman with vanity plates reading V-STER1.
Vanessa’s car.
And clipped to the back of the carbon sheet was a handwritten marina repair invoice signed by Dante, ordering the harbour mechanic to bypass the bilge fume alarm on Slip 14—paid for with a corporate American Express card carrying Vanessa Sterling’s signature.
Luca’s hand didn’t shake as he held the paper, yet the look in his eyes made even Arthur Sterling stop groaning in the snowbank and shrink back against the brick wall.
“I didn’t even know you when Marco died, Vanessa,” Luca said, his voice deadly quiet over the wail of approaching Chicago police sirens. “Your father introduced us at the charity gala three months after my brother’s funeral. Why were you on my brother’s dock at two in the morning with Dante?”
Rosa stepped forward from the shadow of the garden wall, keeping seven-year-old Leo tucked behind her skirt so the boy couldn’t see the blood on Sterling’s forehead.
“Because she wasn’t there to meet you, Luca,” Rosa said softly, holding up the brass 409 safe-deposit key and a small gold locket that had spilled out of the greenhouse lockbox beside the amber pill bottle. “Open that gold locket on the ground.”
Luca knelt and picked up the tarnished oval locket from the flagstones. He popped the brass catch with his thumb.
Inside the left half of the locket was a tiny photograph of Luca’s late brother, Marco, smiling on the deck of his boat.
Inside the right half wasn’t a picture of Marco’s late wife, Sofia—Leo’s mother, who had died when Leo was three.
It was a photograph of Vanessa Sterling.
Wait.
I looked from the locket in Luca’s hand to Vanessa’s pale face.
“You were seeing Marco?” Luca breathed, as if the words themselves were poison. “My brother was going to marry you?”
“He was going to break it off!” Vanessa screamed, tears of pure rage and terror finally breaking through her mask as blue and red police lights flashed through the wrought-iron bars of the alley gate. “I spent a year with Marco while my father set up the Pier 14 zoning merger! Marco promised me half the lakefront trust, and then two days before the boat explosion, he found out my father had handled your mother’s estate in 2000!”
My breath caught in my throat.
“Marco went to see Mama Rosa,” Vanessa sobbed, pointing a shaking finger at the seventy-eight-year-old woman standing by the wall. “Rosa told him about Clara Reed and the heart medicine! Marco called me from the marina that night and told me he was going to the federal prosecutor in the morning to turn my father in and cut us out of the shipping deal!”
“So you called Dante,” Luca said, taking a slow step toward her. “You went down to the harbor at two in the morning and watched him rig the fuel line on my brother’s boat. You murdered Leo’s father—and then three months later, you walked up to me at a charity dinner in a black dress, held my hand, and told me how sorry you were for my loss.”
I had never seen a human being look as cold as Luca Moretti did in that moment.
For two years, Vanessa hadn’t just been gold-digging the head of the Moretti family; she had been covering up the murder of the younger brother before moving on to the older one to finish seizing the company.
And when my father, Thomas Reed, realized seven months ago that the woman engaged to Luca Moretti in the society pages was the same woman he had logged onto the jetty the night Marco died, he had pulled the old carbon log sheet from the harbor archives to bring it to Rosa—only for Dante’s men to ambush him in the guard shack and induce a massive stroke before he could make the call.
“Put your hands on top of your head, everybody freeze!”
Four Chicago police officers and two plainclothes detectives burst through the iron alley gate with their service weapons drawn, followed seconds later by an ambulance crew.
“Detective Vance, over here!” Luca called out, tossing Dante’s suppressed pistol onto the snow ten feet away and raising his empty hands while keeping his boot planted squarely next to the evidence from the lockbox.
A tall, grey-haired detective in a wool trench coat ran past the uniformed officers, took one look at the wrecked Lakeshore Rehab van, my father in his wheelchair with the torn IV line dangling from his arm, and Councilman Arthur Sterling sitting in the snow with the stolen port manifests scattered around his boots.
“Jesus Christ, Luca,” Detective Vance said, holstering his weapon as his partner snapped handcuffs onto the van driver and the man with the syringe. “Your security desk alarm tripped ten minutes ago. What the hell is Arthur Sterling doing in the back of a medical transport van in your alley?”
“He and his daughter just kidnapped a material witness to two murders, Frank,” Luca said, handing Detective Vance the 2000 amber pill bottle and the Belmont Harbor logbook. “And the fifth accomplice is locked inside my wine cellar right now with a broken wrist.”
As two female officers pulled Vanessa to her feet and clicked steel handcuffs around her wrists—right over the diamond bracelet Luca had given her for their engagement—Vanessa twisted her neck back toward us.
“You still don’t know what’s in Box 409 at LaSalle Trust, Luca!” Vanessa spat as they led her toward the squad car, her red dress dragging through the slush. “You think Marco only went to the bank that week to look into your mother’s death? Wait until you open that box tomorrow morning! Your precious Mama Rosa didn’t tell you who else signed the codicil on your brother’s will!”
Rosa stiffened beside me.
May you like
I turned and looked at the seventy-eight-year-old woman.
Beneath the flashing blue lights of the police cruisers, Rosa’s eyes were fixed on seven-year-old Leo—and for the first time all night, her hands were trembling.
