Chapter 7 - THE TRAP AT LAKE GENEVA
Vanessa stared at the laminated visitor’s badge in Luca’s hand as if it were a venomous snake.
For three seconds, the only sound inside the idling Mercedes was the soft, rhythmic breathing of four-year-old Leo sleeping against Elena’s chest.
“No,” Vanessa whispered, shaking her head rapidly. She leaned forward between the leather seats, her manicured nails digging into the upholstery. “No, that’s a lie. That lodge belonged to my maternal grandmother! My father doesn’t even use it!”
“Look at the date on the badge, Vanessa,” Luca said, holding the plastic card under the dome light. “August nineteenth. The day after my birthday. The exact day after you picked Clara up at the cemetery and drove her up to Wisconsin.”
“I didn’t see Corrado there!” Vanessa’s voice rose to a frantic pitch before she caught herself, glancing terrified at the sleeping boy beside me. She dropped her voice to a fierce, shaking whisper. “Luca, I swear to you! When I picked up the house phone on your birthday and heard Clara leaving that message for Sal, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do! Before I drove out to the cemetery, I went downstairs to look for you, and your Uncle Corrado was sitting on the back terrace having coffee!”
Sal closed his eyes in the driver’s seat, letting his head fall back against the headrest with a low groan. “Oh, kid. She walked right into his hands.”
“He was always so kind to me!” Vanessa cried, tears finally breaking through her composure again—not tears of manipulation this time, but the raw terror of a woman realizing she had been a pawn in a massacre. “Whenever my father screamed at me about the merger details, Corrado was the one who calmed him down! He saw me crying on the terrace that morning and asked what was wrong. I told him everything—about the message from Hillside cemetery, about Clara having Marco’s child, about how my father would kill her or ruin the wedding if he found out!”
“And Corrado told you to bring her to Lake Geneva,” Luca finished, his voice like crushed glass.
“Yes!” Vanessa sobbed, covering her face with both hands. “He told me he had two retired security guards he trusted completely who could watch the lodge gates and keep Clara comfortable until after our wedding! He gave me their phone numbers! He told me that if I breathed a word of it to you or to Sal, your hot temper would start the war all over again!”
I sat frozen in the middle seat, my arms instinctively tightening around the edge of Leo’s wool blanket. Everything Vanessa had done—throwing away Sal’s birthday card, trying to force the old driver out through the service entrance before the engagement dinner, sneaking ten thousand dollars to West Addison at midnight—she had thought she was orchestrating a ruthless cover-up to save her marriage and her sister.
In reality, Corrado Moretti had been holding her strings the entire time.
“Wait,” I said, my voice trembling as a horrifying realization hit me. “If Corrado put his own men at that lodge in Lake Geneva… why didn’t he just kill Clara the day Vanessa brought her there? Why keep her alive for four weeks?”
Luca looked down at the open leather briefcase on his knees, then held up the three blue ledger books.
“Because Clara didn’t have the briefcase with her when Vanessa picked her up,” Luca said grimly. “She only had the key and the medal in that metal box at the cemetery. She hadn’t told anyone which train station or bank the key belonged to—only that Marco had told her to give it to Sal. Corrado kept Clara alive in Wisconsin because his men were trying to make her tell them where the briefcase was hidden. And because she wouldn’t break while her son was still out of his reach.”
“And Tuesday morning?” Elena whispered across my lap, her face chalk-white. “When Vanessa went to see her?”
“Corrado’s men let me see her in the upstairs sitting room for ten minutes,” Vanessa breathed, staring down at her shaking hands. “Clara looked so thin, Luca. She grabbed my wrist while the guard stepped into the hall and told me that a man with a scarred nose had been there questioning her about Leo and a train station locker. That’s when I realized the guards weren’t working for me—they were keeping her prisoner! I couldn’t get her past the gates alone, so I drove back to Chicago, emptied my checking account, and made Sal drive me to West Addison after midnight to tell Elena to run!”
Sal turned around in the driver’s seat, his weathered face grave. “And tonight, when Corrado walked into the dining room for the engagement party and saw Miss Emma bring me through the doors with my cardboard box… and heard me say the words West Addison and pull out that little red mitten…”
The air in the car turned to ice.
“Corrado was sitting at the main table,” Luca said, his eyes widening. “He heard the street name. He heard there was a boy.”
“And we left him sitting back at the mansion forty-five minutes ago,” I said, looking down at the heavy black cell phone Luca had put in my hands.
Almost as if my words had summoned it, the phone vibrated against my palm.
It wasn’t an incoming call. It was an automated text alert from the mansion’s smart-gate system—the same system I signed into every morning as head housekeeper to log delivery trucks.
I read the glowing screen aloud, my voice barely above a whisper: ALERT: Rear Service Gate Opened — 9:12 PM. Vehicle Exit: Black Cadillac Escalade (Plate: C-MORETTI-1). Status: Accompanied by 2 Guest Vehicles.
“Nine-twelve,” Sal said, checking the dashboard clock. “That was six minutes after we pulled out of the driveway. He didn’t stay at the party. He took his crew and left RIGHT behind us.”
“He went to West Addison!” Elena gasped, clutching sleeping Leo tighter against her chest. “If we had stayed at that house ten minutes longer—”
“He would have found it empty,” Luca interrupted, his mind moving at lightning speed. “When he gets to 4118 West Addison and sees the lights on, the warm milk on the table, and the beds empty, what is he going to do next?”
Vanessa looked up, her dark eyes wide with terror. “He’ll know I warned you. He’ll know we’re going for the briefcase. And once he realizes he can’t stop you from finding the ledgers…”
“He’ll call Lake Geneva to get rid of the only living witness who can testify that his men held her hostage,” Luca said.
He snatched the phone from my hand, dialed a number from memory, and pressed it to his ear as Sal slammed the Mercedes into gear and roared out of the Union Station cab stand, tires screaming against the wet concrete.
“Frankie,” Luca barked into the phone as Sal whipped the heavy sedan onto the entrance ramp for I-90 North toward Wisconsin. “Listen to me carefully. Lock down the mansion gates from the guardhouse. Do not let anyone from the party leave the property, and check the security cameras from nine o’clock—find out which two cars left with my Uncle Corrado.”
I could hear the muffled, urgent voice of Luca’s head of estate security through the receiver. Then Luca’s face hardened further.
“What do you mean my uncle’s car went north on Lake Shore Drive?” Luca demanded. “West Addison is four miles west of the house, sure, via Belmont—” Luca stopped. He pulled the phone an inch from his ear, staring through the windshield at the highway sign ahead of us: I-90 / I-94 WEST — WISCONSIN / ROCKFORD.
“Sal,” Luca said, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. “Corrado didn’t go to the house on West Addison. He sent Vanni’s car to West Addison. Corrado’s Escalade got on the Kennedy heading north toward Wisconsin thirty-five minutes ago.”
“He has a half-hour head start on us,” Sal said, pressing the accelerator to the floor as the speedometer climbed past ninety.
In the back seat, Vanessa grabbed the back of Luca’s seat, screaming over the roar of the V12 engine. “Luca, call the police! Call the Wisconsin State Patrol! Tell them there’s a kidnapping at the Bellini lodge on Snake Road!”
“And tell them what?” Luca shot back, though his thumb was already hovering over the keypad. “The moment state troopers show up at that gate with sirens blazing, Corrado’s men inside the house will panic and kill your sister before the police ever breach the front door!”
“Then how do we get in before Corrado gets there?” I asked, bracing my hand against the ceiling as Sal wove between two semi-trucks like a man forty years younger.
Sal didn’t take his eyes off the dark ribbon of highway ahead.
“We don’t use the gates on Snake Road,” Sal said calmly. “And Corrado doesn’t have a half-hour lead on me. Because Corrado takes the tollway up through Lake Geneva. He doesn’t know about the old logging fire-road behind the Bellini property line.”
Luca looked at his old driver in astonishment. “How the hell do you know about a fire-road behind the Bellini lodge, Sal?”
May you like
Sal’s weathered hands adjusted nine-and-three on the wheel as the city lights gave way to the pitch-black suburbs of northern Illinois.
“Because in the summer of 2020, six months before Marco died,” Sal said quietly, “that fire-road is where I used to park the station wagon every Sunday night while your brother snuck through the woods to meet Clara.”
