Chapter 7 - THE LANTERN ON SLIP NINE
“She had a mole inside your outer perimeter team,” Frank Marino said, watching from the library window as Dante ran across the rain-swept driveway to check on the two downed guards. “One of the drivers who stayed behind while we went to Archer Avenue must have been on Clara’s payroll for years.”
Luca didn’t waste a second cursing or shouting. He picked up the landline phone on his desk and dialed a direct ten-digit number from memory.
“Inspector Miller? It’s Luca Moretti,” he said, his voice steady and clipped. “Meet me at Burnham Harbor, Slip 9, in twenty-five minutes. Bring the FBI environmental crimes unit and the Coast Guard harbor patrol—no sirens, no flashing lights on Lake Shore Drive. I’m bringing you the original EPA chain-of-custody manifest for the River North Towers, the microcassette recording of Michael Moretti’s murder, and Clara and Enzo Bellini attempting to flee the country by water.”
I stared at him as he hung up the receiver. “You’re calling the FBI? Mr. Moretti, if you hand over the River North files, the family company will lose half its real estate holdings overnight.”
Luca looked at me, then at Frank Marino’s faded blue union jacket.
“My father lived in a two-bedroom walk-up and carried a metal lunch pail so he could sleep with a clear conscience every night,” Luca said quietly. “Everything Victor and Clara built with Bellini blood money is poison. I don’t want a single brick of it. If tearing down half my empire is what it takes to clean my father’s name and save the families living in those towers, then we tear it down tonight.”
Frank smiled, his eyes shining behind his glasses. “Now you sound like Michael.”
“You and Emma and her family are staying right here inside the house with Dante and twelve men locking every steel shutter,” Luca said, reaching into his desk drawer for a black Sig Sauer pistol and checking the magazine.
“Wait a minute,” I said, stepping between Luca and the library door. “You can’t go out on that pier alone without me.”
Luca frowned. “Emma, you’re a housekeeper, not a bodyguard. There is zero chance I am bringing you near Burnham Harbor.”
I held up the gold heart-shaped locket still sitting on his desk blotter. “Look at the hinge on this locket, Mr. Moretti. Why did Aunt Clara take whatever was inside this tin box and leave the locket behind?”
Luca picked it up. “Because the locket belonged to my mother. What was inside the tin box with the tape?”
“A thumb drive,” I said immediately. “When I wiped the box on Tuesday, it rattled slightly inside. Your aunt came back for the digital bank keys on that thumb drive, and she used Vanessa as a hostage because Enzo wouldn’t put his thumbprint on the transfer while his daughter was still in your custody! If you walk onto Slip 9 alone, Clara will shoot you the second you hand over that blueprint. Remember how she got out of this house ten minutes ago? Through the old coal-and-laundry service tunnel that runs under the conservatory.”
Luca’s eyes narrowed. “What does the laundry tunnel have to do with Burnham Harbor?”
“Before my dad had his stroke, I worked two summers cleaning the private yachts moored at Burnham Harbor for Marin Housekeeping Services,” I said rapidly, my heart racing. “Slip 9 isn’t an open wooden pier. It’s the covered winter boathouse at the south end of the harbor—the one with the locked utility catwalk running along the roof beams above the water! A six-foot-two man in an overcoat can’t crawl through that maintenance vent from the bait shop next door, Mr. Moretti. But I can—and I cleaned that boathouse every Friday for two years. I can cut the main floodlight breaker right above their heads the moment you step onto the dock.”
Luca stared at me for three full seconds.
“And I’m driving the car to the harbor entrance,” Frank Marino added stubbornly, pulling his keys from his pocket. “Because Clara knows every black SUV in your fleet, kid, and she’ll spot federal cars half a mile away. Nobody looks twice at a beat-up 2012 Buick LeSabre with a union bumper sticker on the fender.”
Ten minutes later, after making sure my father and little Lily were locked safely inside Luca’s reinforced downstairs media room with Dante, Mrs. Gable, and six trusted guards who had grown up with Luca’s father, the three of us pulled out into the rain in Frank’s old tan Buick.
By 10:48 PM, the rain had turned into a cold lakefront mist rolling off Lake Michigan.
Frank killed the headlights two hundred yards from the south boathouse. While Luca walked calmly down the main wooden boardwalk carrying the rolled-up blueprint tube under his arm, I slipped behind the closed bait-and-tackle shed, climbed the rusted iron ladder sheathed in ivy, and squeezed through the narrow louver vent into the upper rafters of Boathouse 9.
Below me, rising and falling on the dark, oily water of the indoor slip, was a sleek sixty-foot cigarette cruiser with its twin engines idling in a low rumble.
Standing on the concrete apron beside the boat was Aunt Clara in a belted trench coat, holding a compact silver revolver pointed directly at Enzo Bellini and a bound, sobbing Vanessa. Two armed mercenaries stood near the gangplank with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
“That’s far enough, Luca!” Clara’s voice echoed off the damp concrete walls as Luca stepped through the boathouse doorway under the glare of a single overhead work lantern.
“Let Vanessa go, Clara,” Luca said, stopping twenty feet away and holding the blueprint tube out over the edge of the dark water. “She didn’t poison my father, and she didn’t burn that warehouse.”
“Luca, I’m so sorry!” Vanessa sobbed from her knees on the cold concrete, her expensive dress ruined and soaked. “He told me if I didn’t help him cover up Locker 414, we’d lose everything! I didn’t know they killed your father!”
“Shut up, you stupid girl,” Clara snapped without looking back. “Enzo spent twenty years spoiling you while I did the real work keeping this family out of prison! Throw the blueprint and the microcassette onto the deck, Luca—right now!”
“Why didn’t you just leave with the eighty-five million, Clara?” Luca asked, taking one slow step closer so the guards shifted their aim toward him—moving directly beneath the heavy steel boat-hoist chain hanging five feet in front of me on the catwalk. “Why wait here for a piece of paper?”
Clara’s eyes flashed with bitter pride. “Because without that original lab manifest, you can’t prove the soil contamination was known thirty years ago! The insurance company will have to pay out on the towers, and you won’t be able to freeze our offshore accounts through a federal fraud injunction! Toss the tube, or I put a bullet through your fiancée’s knee and then through your heart!”
“You never cared about me at all, did you?” Luca asked quietly. “All those years after my dad died—the birthday dinners, the graduation watch.”
“You were an investment, Luca!” Clara sneered, raising the revolver from Vanessa to point it squarely at Luca’s chest. “Just like your gullible father was until he opened Trailer 19! Take the tube from him, Marco—and then drop all three of them into the slip with anchor chains!”
May you like
Up on the dark catwalk, my hand was already wrapped around the heavy iron switch of the boathouse’s overhead cargo crane and the main floodlight breaker.
I pulled the breaker down and hit the crane release at the exact same second.
