Chapter 2 - THE NAME ON THE YELLOWED PAPER
For five seconds, the only sound in the walnut-paneled study was the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.
Luca didn’t raise his voice. When a man like Luca Moretti got truly dangerous, he didn’t shout; the air around him simply turned to ice. Slowly, he set the tiny square of yellowed paper down beside his father’s gold pocket watch on the leather blotter.
“Daniel,” Luca said without taking his eyes off the man in the gray suit. “Shut the door. Keep the guards outside.”
Daniel stepped in, pulled the heavy mahogany door closed, and folded his arms across his chest.
I sat frozen in the leather chair beside the desk, my freshly bandaged right wrist throbbing under my white uniform cuff. When I had picked that tiny slip of folded paper off the pantry floor four hours ago, I had only glimpsed a few faded letters in cursive ink before slipping it into my apron pocket. Now, with the desk lamp shining directly down on the unfolded square, I could read the three lines written in the neat, old-fashioned hand of Luca’s late father, Lorenzo Moretti:
Marco Santoro. 418 Sycamore Creek Road, Millbrook. November 14, 2015.
My breath caught in my throat.
I knew that date. November 14, 2015, was the night the old Moretti shipping warehouse on the East River burned to the waterline. The newspapers had called it a gang war arson. Two men had supposedly died in the blaze: Lorenzo Moretti’s most trusted consigliere, Marco Santoro—and the night-shift security supervisor who had been accused of taking a bribe to unlock the gates.
That night-shift supervisor was my father, Arthur Parker.
My father hadn’t died in the fire. He had pulled himself out of the river with lungs so scarred by toxic smoke that he had been tethered to an oxygen tank and heart medication for the past eleven years, blacklisted by every union in the state because the police report claimed he had let the arsonists in. He didn’t know I worked for Luca Moretti; I had told my dad I worked at a private country club in Westchester so it wouldn’t break his pride.
“Your name isn’t Wallace, is it?” Luca asked, walking slowly around the edge of his desk until he stood two feet from the stranger in the gray suit.
“Cole,” the man said, his voice tight as a bead of sweat traced his jaw. “Victor Cole. I’m a licensed private investigator out of Newark. I don’t work for any families, Mr. Moretti. I take private retainer work.”
“And Vanessa hired you to find Marco Santoro,” Luca said, his dark eyes narrowing. “A man whose casket I carried at St. Jude’s eleven years ago.”
“You carried a casket full of river stones and a burned watch chain, Mr. Moretti,” Cole said quickly, holding his hands slightly away from his sides so Daniel wouldn’t mistake a twitch for a weapon. “Three weeks ago, Miss Bellini came to my office in Newark. She didn’t give me her real name at first, obviously, until I ran her license plates. She told me she had overheard her father—Donato Bellini—talking in his sleep after his heart surgery last month. He kept repeating that Marco Santoro was still breathing, and that Lorenzo Moretti had hidden the location inside his gold pocket watch before he died.”
Luca’s jaw hardened. The engagement between Luca Moretti and Vanessa Bellini wasn’t a love match—everyone on the estate staff knew it was a peace treaty designed to merge the Moretti port terminals with Donato Bellini’s trucking syndicate after a decade of bad blood stretching back to the 2015 fire.
“Why did she bring you into my house tonight?” Luca demanded.
“Because I found the Millbrook address four days ago without needing the watch,” Cole admitted, glancing nervously at me. “I tracked an unregistered pharmacy delivery for rare burn-scar medication to a cottage on Sycamore Creek Road. When I met Miss Bellini at your service entrance at four o’clock today, I thought she wanted proof he was alive. Instead, she asked me to verify if the address in the watch matched the one I found—so there wouldn’t be two copies of the trail.”
“Wait,” I spoke up before I could stop myself, the memory of the pantry argument rushing back. “You two were arguing by the flour bins before I walked in. You told her, ‘That wasn’t part of the deal, and there’s a kid at the house.’”
Luca’s head snapped toward me, then back to Cole. “A kid?”
Cole swallowed hard. “Santoro isn’t living at the Millbrook cottage alone, Mr. Moretti. He’s seventy-two years old, half-blind from the fire, and raising his nine-year-old grandson, Leo. When I showed Miss Bellini the surveillance photos I took of the cottage this afternoon, she didn’t want me to bring Santoro to you. She offered me two hundred thousand dollars in cash to take the watch so you’d never find the slip of paper—and to burn the Millbrook cottage down before your wedding next Saturday.”
A cold silence dropped over the study.
“You grabbed Hannah’s wrist because she tried to take the watch back,” Luca said softly.
“I grabbed her wrist to get her out of that pantry before Vanessa’s bodyguard walked in the back door!” Cole blurted out, looking straight at me. “Look at your wrist, miss. I pulled you behind the shelving rack when you dropped the paper, didn’t I? Because the man waiting in the black town car outside the service gate wasn’t working for me—he works for Vanessa’s brother, Enzo. When I refused to take the arson money at four o’clock, Vanessa told me if I didn’t come back here at nine-thirty tonight and hand over the negatives from my camera bag, Enzo’s men would already be in Millbrook.”
My stomach dropped.
I looked down at the four dark bruises on my right wrist. He hadn’t twisted my arm to steal the watch—he had yanked me backward into the shadows when the heavy outer service door had clicked open behind us. In my panic, I had misunderstood the entire scuffle.
“Wait,” Luca said, his voice dropping an octave as he stepped back to the desk and snatched up the antique gold pocket watch. “If you already knew the Millbrook address four days ago, Cole... why did Vanessa need to steal my father’s watch out of my study today?”
“Because of the other thing inside the casing, Mr. Moretti,” Cole said grimly. “The slip of paper was only sitting on top of the inner dust cover. Open the back movement plate.”
Luca pressed his thumbnail into the hidden notch beneath the winding crown. The secondary gold plate popped open.
Resting over the brass gears wasn’t an inscription. It was a miniature brass safe-deposit key stamped with the number 714—and engraved directly into the gold rim around the gears were four words in Lorenzo Moretti’s handwriting:
BELLINI PAID THE GUARD.
My heart stopped dead in my chest.
The guard. My father.
May you like
Before I could draw a breath, Daniel’s security radio crackled sharply on his belt.
“Daniel, come in,” the gatehouse guard’s voice barked through the static. “Miss Bellini just walked out the front terrace doors to get something from her town car—and her driver just blew right through the open delivery gate heading north toward Route 9!”
