Chapter 7 - THE POCKET WATCH
Luca moved with a speed that startled me. In a single motion, he shoved the metal strongbox back into the hidden compartment, dropped the cedar floorboard into place, and stepped in front of me just as the suite door swung open.
Standing in the hallway wasn’t Victor Bellini.
It was Marco Moretti—Luca’s sixty-two-year-old uncle, his dead father’s younger brother, and the man who had sat at Luca’s right hand at the engagement table downstairs, toasting the future of the family company.
Marco was wearing a dark charcoal suit with a pale gray silk pocket square. He paused on the threshold, his sharp eyes taking in the open doors of the cedar wardrobe, the brass key still in Luca’s hand, and the blue velvet notebook clutched against my chest.
“Vanessa came downstairs looking like she’d seen a ghost,” Marco said calmly, stepping into the room and pushing the heavy oak door shut behind him. “And Sal’s black Mercedes is gone from the driveway. Where did you go, nephew?”
Luca didn’t move an inch. He looked down at his uncle’s tailored jacket, then at the gold pocket watch in his own hand—where the torn scrap of gray silk with a silver monogrammed M button was still twisted around the winding stem.
“My father wasn’t buried with grandpa’s watch,” Luca said, his voice dead calm. “He gave it to you at the hospital the week before he died.”
Marco’s gaze flicked down to the cracked watch in Luca’s palm. For a moment, the genial, smiling uncle who always slipped me an extra twenty-dollar bill at Christmas vanished, leaving behind a cold, calculating man whose eyes looked remarkably like a predator’s.
“You always were too sentimental for this business, Luca,” Marco sighed, slipping his right hand into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. “Just like your father at the end. When he had that second heart attack and realized the feds were auditing the construction books, he wanted to confess everything to you and let you marry that broke little symphony girl. If he had done that, the Bellinis would have called in the port loans, the feds would have seized the company, and forty years of our work would have gone up in smoke.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. Downstairs, thirty guests were eating chocolate mousse while two floors above them, the real architect of the last five years was finally stepping out of the shadows.
“Victor Bellini didn’t threaten Elena at the hospital five years ago,” Luca said, realization dawning across his face like a slow, dark tide. “You told Sal that Victor threatened her so Sal would spirit her out of Chicago before I could see her.”
“Sal was easy to read,” Marco admitted almost conversationally. “All I had to do was stand outside your father’s hospital room with Victor and talk loud enough about getting rid of the girl. I knew the old driver’s conscience would make him pack her into his Buick and drive her out of the state before dawn. And then I handed your dying father a canceled fifty-thousand-dollar check with Elena’s forged signature on the back so he’d convince you she was a thief.”
“And three years ago?” I couldn’t stop myself from speaking, my fingers tightening on Elena’s blue notebook. “When Elena came back to Lake Geneva on October fourteenth to tell Mr. Moretti he had a two-year-old son?”
Marco looked at me behind Luca’s shoulder with mild annoyance. “I owned the Lake Geneva property after my brother died. When the caretaker called me to say Elena Vance was at the boat house asking for Luca, I drove up there myself while Luca and Victor were in New York. I offered her a quarter of a million dollars to take the kid and move to Europe permanently. Instead, she tried to run out onto the pier to her car. We struggled in the dark. She grabbed my vest—ripped my watch right off the chain—and when I reached into the dark water under the pier to pull her out, all my hand caught was the gold bracelet on her wrist.”
A terrible silence fell over the room.
“Tomorrow morning,” Marco continued quietly, “when I realized the body must have drifted out into the deep channel, I dropped her bracelet into a Peacock Jewelers box and gave it to Victor to give to Vanessa for her birthday. That way, if anyone ever came looking into Elena Vance’s disappearance, the trail would lead straight to the Bellinis.”
“Wait,” Luca breathed, his voice shaking with a fury so intense his whole body trembled. “You thought she drowned in Lake Geneva?”
Marco frowned slightly. “She went under the pier in fifty-degree water and never came up, Luca. Nobody survives that.”
“Then why is there a hospital discharge wrist-tag from Mercy Convent in Green Bay stapled inside the back cover of this notebook,” I said, holding up the open back page of the blue velvet journal I had just glanced at, “dated six months AFTER October fourteenth?”
Both Luca and Marco froze.
Luca spun halfway around and looked down at the plastic hospital bracelet stapled to the final page of the velvet book. Printed on the faded white plastic was: JANE DOE #44 — ADMITTED 10/15/2023 — DISCHARGED TO ST. THERESE CARE HOME, EVANSTON.
“She didn’t drown,” Luca whispered, the words tearing out of his throat like a prayer. “A fisherman or a patrol boat pulled her out downshore. She hit her head on the pier, Marco—and she’s been in a Catholic care home ten miles north of here for three years!”
Marco’s composure shattered instantly. If Elena was alive in Evanston, everything he had built—including his control over the company board and the Bellini merger—was finished.
He pulled a small, black snub-nosed revolver from inside his suit jacket and aimed it directly at Luca’s chest.
“Give me the notebook and the watch, Luca,” Marco ordered, stepping back toward the door and turning the deadbolt with his left hand. “Nobody downstairs can hear a thirty-eight through three floors of oak and plaster over the string quartet. It’ll look like you came upstairs to get your father’s heirloom watch after arguing with Vanessa, found an intruder going through the wedding trunks, and the maid got caught in the crossfire.”
Luca didn’t back down. He shifted half an inch to his left, shielding me completely with his body. “You shoot me in this room, Marco, and Sal will walk into the federal building on Dearborn Street tomorrow morning with my son.”
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“Sal won’t make it to Dearborn Street,” Marco said coldly, pulling his cell phone from his trouser pocket with his left hand and holding up the glowing screen so Luca could see the text message he had sent ten minutes ago—right before walking up the stairs.
On the screen was the West Addison address Vanessa had blurted out to her father the moment she sat down at the dinner table—followed by a single line to Victor Bellini’s two dock enforcers: Clean out the house and bring the old driver’s car to the river.
