Chapter 8 - THE THIRD MECHANIC
The air left my lungs in a single rush.
“Leo,” Elena whispered behind me, her hands flying to her mouth as she saw the glowing screen over Luca’s shoulder. “Oh God, my baby—”
“Who was the third man on the brownstone perimeter tonight?” Luca demanded, his hand tightening on Martha’s coat collar until her toes barely brushed the concrete.
“Tommy,” Martha spat back, a triumphant gleam in her eyes. “The gatehouse kid at your Gold Coast house. My nephew on my sister’s side. Who do you think let Clara and the boy into the service alley at five-fifteen without alerting the house guards? Tommy’s already at the brownstone, Moretti. And unless Victor and I walk out of here with the harbor deeds in ten minutes, Tommy brings the boy right to the federal prosecutor’s office as leverage for Victor’s immunity deal!”
My knees went weak with relief and terror all at once.
Wait.
Tommy wasn’t going to hurt Leo—Victor and Martha needed the child alive to trade to the feds along with the dock manifests so Victor wouldn’t go back to prison for Dante’s murder.
Then Elena stopped crying.
She blinked hard, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand, and looked closely at the photograph on Luca’s phone screen.
“Wait a minute,” Elena said quietly.
I looked at her. “What?”
“Look at the kitchen table in that picture,” Elena said, pointing a trembling finger at the upper corner of the photo.
Sitting on the kitchen table of the brownstone, right beside the whistling kettle, was Leo’s wooden toy train—the one with the broken wheel he never let out of his sight, not even when he slept.
And laid neatly across the top of the wooden train were three dried bay leaves from the spice rack.
Luca’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the screen.
“Three bay leaves,” Luca murmured, the tension in his shoulders shifting instantly. “My mother used to put three bay leaves on the windowsill in Springfield whenever my father’s cousins were coming over for Sunday dinner—it was her way of telling us boys to stay down in the root cellar until the company left.”
I gasped.
“Mrs. Moretti didn’t get kidnapped,” I breathed. “When Tommy knocked on the back door, she knew something was wrong! Every old brownstone in Little Italy has a coal chute basement behind the pantry—she took Leo and Marco down into the cellar and locked the iron grate from the inside!”
Martha’s triumphant smirk vanished.
Before she could utter another word, the blue and red strobes of four Chicago Police cruisers burst through the fog outside the boat shed, sirens wailing as bolt cutters snapped the padlock off the sliding steel door.
Arthur Bellini stared toward the opening door in shock.
“You called the police?” Arthur whispered at Luca, horrified. “Luca, those manifests in your coat have the Moretti shipping seal on them! You’ll bring your own empire down with me!”
Luca looked at the old man with quiet, absolute calm as uniform officers swarmed into the warehouse with weapons drawn.
“The only pages in this folder are the ones you and Victor signed after my father’s stroke, Arthur,” Luca said evenly, tossing Arthur’s revolver onto the hood of the town car and raising his empty hands as detectives stepped forward. “Dante spent the last six months of his life transferring every legal harbor contract into a clean blind trust. That’s why you killed him—because you realized he had already cut you out.”
Within three minutes, Victor Novak, Martha, and Arthur Bellini were in steel handcuffs under the glare of the floodlights.
While paramedics strapped an oxygen mask over my father’s face at the back of an ambulance and checked his EKG—which, thank God, my dad grumpy- insisted was “steady as an oak”—Luca knelt beside Vanessa’s chair with my putty knife and cut the ropes off her wrists.
Her red evening gown was torn at the hem and stained with oil, and her blonde hair hung limp around her bruised face.
She didn’t reach for him this time.
She just rubbed her raw wrists and looked up at him with exhausted, hollow eyes.
“I’m sorry, Luca,” Vanessa whispered, her voice barely audible over the ambulance engine. “I knew five years ago what my father was. I thought if I married you and kept Elena hidden in Joliet, nobody else would have to die.”
Luca looked down at her for a long moment.
There was no hatred in his face—only a deep, final distance.
“You kept my brother’s son alive, Vanessa,” Luca said quietly, draping his black tuxedo jacket over her shivering shoulders. “For that, I’ll make sure my lawyers keep your name out of your father’s indictment, and I’ll pay for your ticket wherever you want to go outside Illinois. But you’re never setting foot near my family again.”
Vanessa closed her eyes and nodded once, letting a female detective help her toward the waiting squad car.
I stood by the ambulance doors, holding my father’s hand while the paramedic taped an IV line to his arm.
“They’re taking me back to St. Luke’s just for overnight observation, Emmy,” my dad said, squeezing my fingers hard. “Go with the man and check on that little boy. I got two cops outside my room now—nobody’s bothering me tonight.”
I kissed his gray temple, promised I would be at the hospital by sunrise with fresh coffee, and turned around just as Luca walked up to me in his white dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and smudged with soot.
“Tommy bolted from the brownstone the second he heard police dispatch heading here,” Luca said, opening the door of the SUV for me. “Airport security already picked him up at Midway.”
Twenty minutes later, we ran up the stone steps of the Little Italy brownstone alongside Elena.
Inside the warm kitchen, Marco was sitting on a stool holding an ice pack to the back of his head where Tommy had blindsided him at the back door—and sitting right beside him at the oak table were Clara Moretti and Leo.
Leo had a blanket wrapped around his navy wool coat and was eating a slice of buttered toast while lining up bay leaves on the tablecloth.
The second Elena walked through the kitchen doorway, the little boy froze.
The toast dropped onto his plate.
“Mama!” Leo shouted, scrambling off the wooden chair and running across the linoleum straight into his mother’s arms.
Elena dropped to her knees, burying her face in his dark curls as she sobbed against his neck, holding him so tightly it looked like she would never let go.
I stood by the doorway, wiping my eyes with the corner of my apron, feeling the exhaustion of the last six hours finally settling into my bones.
Then Mrs. Moretti stood up from the table, walked over to Luca, and placed a small, yellowed envelope into his hand—one that had been hidden inside the lining of the navy wool coat Leo was wearing.
May you like
“Elena sewed this into the coat before she gave it to me on the bus,” Clara said softly. “It isn’t from her, Luca. Dante wrote it the night before he died.”
Luca opened the folded note, read the first two lines, and looked slowly up at my face with an expression that stopped my breath cold.
