Chapter 5 - The Man Closest to Dominic
Marco Bellini had been standing beside Dominic since before I knew Dominic's name.
He was the man who had arrived at the diner with the private doctor.
He was the man who had driven us to Union Station.
He was the man who had spent the previous night coordinating security at Dominic's penthouse while I slept down the hall.
He was also Dominic's cousin.
Not by blood, technically. Their mothers had been best friends, and Marco's father had served Salvatore Vescari for thirty years. But according to Dominic, he and Marco had grown up in the same house, gone to the same schools, taken beatings from the same old boxing coach, and buried both their fathers within eighteen months of each other.
“Clarence could be wrong,” Dominic said.
We were in a private hospital conference room.
“He isn't.”
“You don't know that.”
“He recognized my father's handwriting.”
“That doesn't prove the message means what he says it means.”
“You're defending Marco.”
“I am refusing to condemn him based on one decoded postcard.”
I folded my arms.
“Your father trusted Harlan.”
Dominic flinched almost invisibly.
I regretted the sentence as soon as it left my mouth.
Not because it wasn't true.
Because I knew exactly where to put the knife now.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
“No. You're right.”
That was becoming one of the most irritating things about him.
He could admit when I was right.
It made fighting with him much less satisfying.
“So what do we do?”
“We tell Marco nothing.”
“Finally.”
“We give him something false instead.”
I studied him.
“You want to set a trap.”
“Yes.”
“What false thing?”
Dominic's eyes went to the postcard.
“We tell him Clarence decoded a location.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere empty.”
“And see who shows up.”
“Exactly.”
I hated how natural this was beginning to feel.
Three days earlier, my biggest problem had been whether the Bluebird's freezer compressor would survive the month.
Now I was helping a mafia boss run counterintelligence against his own cousin.
My mother would have grounded me until I was forty.
We chose an abandoned Vescari warehouse near Goose Island.
Dominic told Marco that Clarence's postcard pointed there and that we would search it after midnight.
Then we went nowhere near it.
Instead, Dominic placed two men he trusted on a roof across the river with cameras.
At 12:17 a.m., three black SUVs arrived.
Vincent Caruso stepped out of the first one.
I knew him from photographs Dominic had shown me.
Sixty-one. Silver hair. Expensive coat. Face like a grandfather in a bank commercial.
The sort of man who could order a murder and then complain his soup needed salt.
Detective Raymond Harlan stepped out of the second SUV.
I felt sick.
The deputy superintendent of Chicago Police walked into the warehouse with four armed men.
At 12:23, another car arrived.
Marco got out.
Dominic stared at the monitor.
He didn't move.
He didn't blink.
Nothing in his face changed except his eyes.
I had seen grief before.
At my mother's funeral.
In the mirror after my father's supposed death.
Grief did not always look like tears.
Sometimes it looked like a man discovering that one of the few people he loved had been lying to him for half his life.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered.
Dominic shut off the screen.
“No.”
His voice was rough.
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to know why.”
The answer came sooner than we expected.
At 1:06, Marco called Dominic.
Dominic put the phone on speaker.
“Warehouse is clean,” Marco said. “Caruso must not have the postcard information yet.”
Dominic looked at me.
I watched the lie travel through the room.
“You sure?” Dominic asked.
“I checked it myself.”
“Good.”
A pause.
“Where are you?” Marco asked.
“With Norah.”
Another pause, smaller this time.
“She okay?”
“She will be.”
“Dom, listen. We should move her out of the city. Tonight.”
“Why?”
“Caruso's getting desperate.”
Dominic's face hardened.
“I'll think about it.”
He ended the call.
I let out a breath.
“He wanted to know where I was.”
“Yes.”
“What now?”
“Now we find your father before Marco realizes we know.”
Clarence helped decode the rest of the postcard.
The numbers were not coordinates.
They referred to old Caruso bookkeeping pages, a cipher based on dates and account columns. When Clarence reconstructed them, they produced a name.
ST. AGNES.
There were six places in Illinois with St. Agnes in the name.
One was a shuttered rehabilitation hospital forty miles southwest of Chicago.
It had closed seven years earlier.
The property had been purchased through a company Dominic recognized as a Caruso shell.
We drove there before dawn.
This time Dominic took only one man, a quiet former Marine named Isaiah Cole whom he said he would trust with his sister's life.
“Do you have a sister?” I asked.
Dominic looked out the window.
“Had.”
I didn't ask again.
St. Agnes sat behind a rusted fence and a line of dead trees.
The building looked abandoned from the road.
Inside, it was not.
There was fresh food in a refrigerator.
A generator running in the basement.
Medical supplies in one room.
And security cameras that had been disconnected less than an hour before we arrived.
“They knew,” Isaiah said.
Dominic looked at me.
“Marco.”
We searched anyway.
On the third floor, I found a room with a hospital bed bolted to the floor.
The window had bars.
My stomach folded in on itself.
On the wall beside the bed were pencil marks.
Not random scratches.
Dates.
Hundreds of them.
I moved closer.
Near the bottom, written in shaky block letters, were two words.
NORA 24.
He had left off the H.
My father always did that when he wrote quickly.
I touched the wall.
“He was here.”
Dominic stood behind me.
“He was here recently.”
On a small table sat a photograph.
Me.
Walking out of the Bluebird two months earlier.
Beside it was a yellow legal pad covered in my father's handwriting. Most pages contained only dates, short notes, and the same sentence repeated in different forms.
Norah safe.
Norah at work.
Norah with Marlene.
Norah home.
At first I thought he had somehow been watching me.
Then I saw the clipped photographs taped to several pages.
Caruso had been bringing him reports.
My father had been forced to record what he noticed from them.
One page held a picture of me carrying groceries in the rain. Under it, he had written: Left knee still turns inward when tired. Same as Elaine.
I sat down hard.
Another page: Hair longer. Looks healthy. Thank God.
Another: Birthday. 24 today. Still alive. Keep the lie one more year.
I pressed the pad to my chest.
Dominic turned away, giving me privacy in a room where privacy had not existed for thirteen years.
“He counted my birthdays,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“He knew what I looked like.”
“Yes.”
“All this time I thought he chose not to come back.”
Dominic said nothing.
I looked at the barred window.
“He stayed alive for me.”
“I think he stayed alive because he believed you were doing the same.”
That broke something open in me. I cried quietly, not the explosive grief from Union Station, but a slower grief for all the ordinary moments my father had been forced to experience as photographs and dates.
When I could breathe again, I put the legal pad carefully inside my coat.
Taken from across the street.
I felt suddenly exposed, every ordinary morning reclassified as surveillance.
Under the photograph was a newspaper clipping about my mother's death.
I sat on the edge of the bed because my legs stopped working.
Dominic crouched in front of me.
“He was alive,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Eight months ago. Maybe less.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn't he escape?”
Dominic looked at the bars.
“Maybe he couldn't.”
I swallowed hard.
“Or maybe he stayed because Caruso threatened me.”
Dominic didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
I pressed my palms together to stop them shaking.
“I'm going to kill Vincent Caruso.”
“No.”
I looked at him.
“You don't get to tell me no.”
“I do if you're talking about murder.”
I laughed bitterly.
“That's rich.”
“Yes.”
“You're Dominic Vescari.”
“I am aware.”
“You expect me to believe you've never killed anyone?”
He held my gaze.
“No.”
The answer stole the air from my lungs.
He continued before I could speak.
“I expect you to believe I know what it costs.”
There was no pride in his face.
No swagger.
Only something old and heavy.
“I don't want that cost in you,” he said.
The room became very quiet.
I looked away first.
Isaiah called from the hallway.
“Boss.”
We followed him to a back stairwell.
He had found a smear of dried blood on the railing and a discarded prescription bottle.
The label read:
EDWARD HARRIS.
Age: 56.
The birth date was my father's.
The prescription had been filled nine days earlier.
My father was alive nine days ago.
At the bottom of the stairs, we found tire tracks leading to a service road.
Isaiah photographed them.
Dominic was studying the ground when my phone buzzed.
A text from Marlene.
WHERE ARE YOU?
I typed: Safe. Why?
Her reply came instantly.
A MAN IS HERE ASKING FOR YOU.
WHO?
Three dots appeared.
Then vanished.
Then appeared again.
Finally:
HE SAYS HIS NAME IS EVAN HAYES.
My heart stopped.
I called her.
No answer.
Again.
No answer.
Dominic saw my face.
“What?”
I showed him the screen.
For half a second, hope hit both of us.
Then his expression changed.
“It's a trap.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if your father escaped Caruso nine days ago, he would not walk into the diner in daylight and announce his name.”
I wanted him to be wrong.
I needed him to be wrong.
We drove back to Chicago at a speed that made every traffic light feel personal.
The Bluebird's front door was open.
One chair lay on its side.
Coffee spread across the floor.
Marlene was gone.
On the counter sat a white envelope.
Inside was a photograph of my father.
Older.
Thinner.
Alive.
He was sitting in a chair with a newspaper from that morning held against his chest.
On the back, someone had written:
MIDNIGHT TOMORROW.
THE KEY FOR THE GIRL.
OR THE OLD MAN AND THE WOMAN DIE TOGETHER.
I stared at the photograph until the words blurred.
Dominic read the note.
His voice was very quiet.
“They have your father.”
“They have Marlene.”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
“And they think I have a key.”
Dominic's eyes moved to the old cash register.
May you like
“No,” he said.
“They think you are the key.”
