Chapter 6 - THE LOCKET IN THE SAFE
“Get everyone in the cars!” Luca roared, already sprinting toward the lead SUV with the blueprint and the yellow pharmacy receipt clutched in his fist. “Dante, leave two men here to guard the gates—no, bring Mr. Reed and the little girl with us! We aren’t splitting up!”
Within ninety seconds, Dante and Luca lifted my father’s wheelchair into the back of the armored suburban, while I climbed into the middle row beside Lily and Frank Marino. Vanessa was shoved into the second vehicle between two guards.
Tires screamed against the wet asphalt as we tore out of the meatpacking yard and headed back north toward Lake Shore Drive.
Lily pressed her face against my sweater as the SUV wove through traffic at eighty miles an hour. “Aunt Emma, why is Mr. Luca’s car going so fast?”
“He left something very important at his house, baby,” I said, stroking her hair and keeping my voice as calm and warm as I could. “Keep your eyes closed and count to one hundred with Grandpa, okay?”
In the rear seat behind me, my father held Lily’s hand through the gap between the headrests, softly counting with her while Frank Marino leaned forward to speak to Luca in the front passenger seat.
“Luca, it makes sense now,” Frank said grimly over the hum of the engine. “Nobody at the warehouse ever knew Victor’s wife was born a Bellini. She was Enzo’s younger sister!”
Luca stared out the rain-streaked windshield, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle twitched beneath his cheekbone. “When my mother died of cancer when I was seven, Aunt Clara moved into our house three days a week to ‘help out.’ My father trusted her completely. When he got sick from the smoke inhalation after the fire, she was the one who sorted his pills into his weekly plastic organizer every Sunday night.”
“Why would she turn on her own husband and brother tonight?” I asked quietly from the middle seat.
“Because Victor and Enzo are weak,” Luca said coldly. “Once I arrested them in my dining room tonight, Clara knew one of them would cut a deal with the federal prosecutor and trade her name to save himself from a murder charge. My father died of poison—that carries a life sentence with no parole in Illinois. The warehouse fire was thirty years ago, and Victor and Enzo thought the statute of limitations on arson would protect them. They didn’t count on Clara cutting them loose first.”
Fifteen minutes later, our SUVs crashed through the open iron gates of the Moretti mansion in Lincoln Park.
Two of Luca’s house guards were sitting on the front granite steps holding ice packs to their heads, while the rest of the security team had the perimeter locked down.
“ stay in the car with Mr. Reed and Lily, Dante!” Luca ordered, jumping out before the vehicle fully stopped. “Frank, Emma, inside with me!”
Why me? I wondered, hurrying up the marble steps behind them—and then I remembered: as head housekeeper on the evening floor, I was the only person besides Luca who knew every hidden nook and linen closet in the upstairs family wing.
The library looked like a hurricane had hit it. The oil portrait of Luca’s grandfather had been ripped off the mahogany paneling, revealing the heavy steel door of the wall safe standing wide open.
Victor Moretti was slumped in a leather armchair with a bloody lip where one of Clara’s hired thugs had pistol-whipped him on the way out. Enzo Bellini was gone.
“Where is Enzo?” Luca demanded, grabbing his uncle by the lapels of his torn tuxedo jacket.
Victor coughed, spitting blood onto a silk handkerchief. “Your sweet Aunt Clara took him with her! Wait—Luca, listen to me! She didn’t break in here to rescue Enzo! She took him at gunpoint because Enzo’s thumbprint is required along with hers to wire the eighty-five million dollars out of the Cayman escrow account before the banks open in Zurich at two a.m.!”
“What did she take from my father’s safe?” Luca demanded, looking into the empty steel vault.
“Everything,” Victor gasped, his arrogance completely shattered now that his own wife had left him behind to take the fall. “The stock certificates, the bearer bonds, and the cedar box your father kept on the top shelf.”
I stepped up beside the open safe and looked inside.
Then I smiled faintly and reached my hand up inside the upper steel frame of the vault, right behind the heavy iron locking bolts where I dusted with a microfiber cloth every Tuesday morning.
My fingers closed around a small, flat tin box held to the roof of the safe by two heavy industrial magnets.
“Mrs. Moretti never did her own dusting,” I said, pulling the magnetic tin box out and handing it to Luca. “And you asked me three months ago to wipe down the inside of the vault frame while you were changing the combination. That cedar box on the shelf was empty except for old cufflinks. This is what was stuck to the ceiling plate.”
Luca stared at me in astonishment, then pried open the tin box.
Resting on a piece of faded blue velvet was a gold heart-shaped locket and a microcassette tape labeled in neat handwriting: CLARA — OCTOBER 12, 2006.
“There’s a microcassette player in my desk drawer,” Luca said, moving swiftly to the mahogany desk and snapping the tiny tape into the dictaphone.
He pressed play.
Through the static came the ragged, wheezing voice of Michael Moretti—recorded just forty-eight hours before his death—speaking across a kitchen table to a woman whose calm, cultured voice made my blood run cold.
“You think I don’t know what you’re doing, Clara?” Michael’s voice wheezed on the tape. “I had the pills tested. If you don’t take your brother Enzo and leave Chicago tonight, I’m going to the police in the morning.”
Then Aunt Clara’s voice replied on the tape, cold and terrifyingly serene:
“And leave Luca with nothing, Michael? Your union pride would keep that boy working in a grease pit for the rest of his life! Wait until I’m finished. Once you’re gone and Victor takes over the freight contracts, Luca will inherit an empire. And if you say one word to the cops tonight, I’ll tell them eighteen-year-old Luca was the one who drove the van that dumped those chemical drums into the Chicago River!”
Luca slammed his hand down on the stop button. His knuckles were white.
Then he opened the gold heart-shaped locket that had been inside the tin box with the tape.
Inside the left half was a tiny photo of Luca’s mother. Inside the right half, tucked behind the plastic cover, was a folded baggage claim ticket from a maritime charter dock—dated Tonight, October 24, 2026.
“Wait,” Frank Marino said, leaning over the desk and reading the printed dock number on the fresh ticket. “Why would a ticket for tonight be inside your father’s locket?”
I looked closer at the dust on the velvet lining. “Because I cleaned that safe on Tuesday—and that ticket wasn’t in there on Tuesday. Aunt Clara didn’t miss this tin box tonight. She opened it, took out whatever was inside, and left that ticket for you on purpose.”
Luca flipped the dock ticket over. Written on the back in his aunt’s distinctive fountain pen was a single sentence:
May you like
Burnham Harbor, Slip 9. Bring the soil blueprint alone by 11:00 PM, or Enzo’s daughter goes into the lake with her father.
Luca spun toward the window. Down in the driveway, the rear door of the second SUV was standing wide open, the two guards unconscious on the wet pavement—and Vanessa was gone.
