Chapter 7 - THE MAFIA BOSS DISCOVERED HIS MOST TRUSTED LIEUTENANT HAD BEEN HIDING EVIDENCE FROM THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING—BUT WHEN FAY WAS KIDNAPPED, DOMINIC REALIZED THE WOMAN WHO HAD GIVEN HIM HOPE WAS ABOUT TO PAY FOR HIS FAMILY'S DARKEST SECRET
The signature on the shipping report was Carmine Russo's. I had looked at it so many times that the ink seemed to have burned itself into my vision. Beside it was the signature of Ethan Willis, dated three days after the world had been told he was missing. I wanted the paper to confess. I wanted to know whether Carmine had signed because he was saving Ethan, imprisoning him, or arranging his disappearance.
Instead, the paper sat on my desk, stubbornly ordinary.
Across the room, Fay stood at the window with her arms folded. Beyond the glass, Chicago's winter lights shimmered over the lake. Her shoulder was still healing from the fire at the charity gala. The doctor had told her to rest. Fay had listened politely and then spent the next morning helping Mrs. Gable reorganize the household emergency plans. She was a terrible patient and, I was beginning to understand, a remarkably good friend.
“You're staring at that report again,” she said.
“It's my best skill. I can intimidate a document for hours.”
“Does it ever work?”
“Not once.”
She crossed to my desk. I slid the report toward her. She read the names and dates, then pointed to a number in the margin. “That's not a hospital invoice. Ethan used to talk about these. It's a container release code.”
“Can you identify it?”
“Not from the number alone. But he kept a notebook. He said that if a container was moved after inspection, the original release code would still appear on the insurance paperwork.”
“Where's the notebook?”
She looked away. “I thought the police had it. They took everything from his apartment after he disappeared. But one page was missing before they arrived.”
I called Claire Donnelly. She was my attorney, but lately she had become the only person in my business willing to tell me things I didn't want to hear. She asked us to send the report securely and reminded me that a signature was evidence of contact, not proof of a crime. She was right. I resented it.
By noon the investigators had matched the release code to a refrigerated truck that had crossed Pier Nineteen on the night I was shot. Its cargo was listed as medical equipment. The truck's owner was Meridian Clinical Logistics, the company tied to the suspicious shipments Fay's brother had investigated. The driver was Paul Vescari, the man we had once believed dead.
The next discovery was worse. The truck had entered the pier through a gate normally reserved for my private security detail. Only two people could authorize that access without a second signature: me and Carmine. I had been at a meeting across town when the authorization was issued.
I sent Carmine a message asking him to come to the study. Claire told me not to confront him without witnesses. I had no intention of repeating the mistakes that had brought us here. Two independent investigators waited in the adjoining room, and a police detective was on his way.
Carmine entered wearing the same dark suit he had worn for thirteen years. There was a small scar above his eyebrow from a fight in which he had once protected me. I remembered sitting beside his hospital bed afterward, promising his wife I would never forget what he had done. The memory made my stomach turn.
“You wanted me?” he asked.
I held up the report. “Why is your signature beside Ethan Willis's?”
His eyes moved to the paper. The change in his expression was so slight that another man might have missed it. I had known him too long.
“Ethan was an informant,” he said. “I was trying to keep him alive.”
“Then why didn't you tell me?”
“Because he was investigating your warehouses.”
“People investigate my warehouses every day.”
“Not people who believed the shipments were being used to move stolen medical supplies.”
I felt Fay stiffen beside me. “My brother told you that?”
Carmine turned toward her. “He told me enough to make himself a target.”
“Where is he?”
“I don't know.”
“Look at me and say that again,” Fay demanded.
Carmine did. “I don't know where Ethan is now.”
Now. The word sat between us like a blade.
I asked him when he had last seen Ethan. He said he couldn't remember the date. I asked why he had approved the truck. He said the authorization had been routine. When I asked who had ordered the emergency operations payments, he glanced at the doorway. I understood that he was calculating his chances of leaving.
“Sit down,” I said.
“Dominic, this is getting ridiculous.”
“Then explain it and make me feel ridiculous.”
Carmine's face hardened. “You think you can run an organization from that chair without relying on anyone? You were shot because you refused to listen. I kept everything together while you screamed at doctors and broke furniture. Somebody had to.”
For a moment I could hear only the blood rushing in my ears. He had touched the part of me I hated most: the months when I had allowed pain to become cruelty. But he had also mistaken that shame for permission to control me.
“Keeping a business running doesn't give you the right to hide a missing man,” I said.
He stood. The investigators entered. Carmine stared at them, then at Fay, and something cold passed over his face.
“You should have stayed out of this,” he told her.
The detective arrived before he could say more. Carmine agreed to accompany him for questioning, but he was not arrested. Claire insisted on the distinction. There was still no proof that he had ordered my shooting. He walked out of my house without looking back.
I thought that would make Fay feel safer. Instead, she went pale.
“He knew the notebook was missing,” she said.
“What?”
“I never told him about the missing page. He asked me about it last week, when you were at therapy. I thought he was helping.”
We informed the detective. Mrs. Gable moved Fay to a room nearer the central staircase, and the household changed its access codes. Fay refused to be treated like a prisoner. She wanted to go to the police station herself, give a formal statement, and ask about Ethan's case. I agreed, arranging a car through the independent security team rather than Carmine's men.
That afternoon I attended physical therapy with Nina Patel. She was a woman who believed that the truth was kinder than false encouragement. She checked my skin, reviewed my blood pressure, and helped me practice transfers. My right leg still produced spasms. There were moments of sensation, moments of movement, and long stretches of uncertainty. None of it resembled the miraculous recovery the newspapers would have preferred.
“You're distracted,” Nina said.
“Someone I trusted may have helped arrange my shooting.”
“Then today we'll do what you can safely do. You don't need to solve your entire life before lunch.”
I hated that she sounded like Fay.
When I returned home, Mrs. Gable was waiting in the entrance hall. She was holding Fay's phone.
“She never came back from the station,” she said.
The room seemed to tilt. I took the phone. A message had arrived from an unknown number: WE HAVE HER. IF YOU WANT TO SEE HER ALIVE, COME TO PIER NINETEEN. NO POLICE.
I read it twice. The old Dominic would have summoned armed men and driven into a trap. The man I was trying to become called the detective first. He took the message seriously, arranged a response team, and asked me to remain available. I insisted on giving them every detail about the pier, the access roads, and the unused refrigeration buildings. I knew that place better than anyone.
Then my own phone rang.
A man's voice said, “You should have let Carmine keep you comfortable.”
“Where is Fay?”
“She asks too many questions. So did her brother.”
“Is Ethan alive?”
A pause. “For the moment.”
I closed my eyes. I had spent six months believing the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. Now I understood how wrong I was.
“Tell Fay,” I said, “that I'm coming for her.”
The voice laughed. “That's the problem, Corso. You can't even stand.”
He disconnected.
I stared at the dead screen, then rolled toward the door. Mrs. Gable caught up with me.
“Where do you think you're going?”
“To help the police.”
“You'll help them by staying alive.”
“I know.” My voice broke on the words. “I know. But she came into this house with nothing, and I let her believe I could keep her safe.”
Margaret knelt so that we were eye to eye. “You cannot promise anyone a world without danger. You can promise not to abandon them. Those are different things.”
She placed Fay's folded eviction notice on my lap. Fay had asked Margaret to keep it until she could pay her old landlord and close that chapter of her life. I looked at the creased paper and remembered the first day she had arrived in the rain. She had been afraid of homelessness, not of me. I had mistaken her courage for insolence because I had forgotten what ordinary courage looked like.
Before the police called, I remembered the first winter Carmine had worked for me. We had been young enough to mistake exhaustion for invincibility. He had slept on a couch outside my office after a threat against my father, and when I told him to go home he said he would rather lose a night's sleep than bury a friend. I had believed him. I still believed that some part of him had meant it. That was what made the possibility of betrayal so difficult to accept. People were not always monsters from the beginning. Sometimes they made a series of choices, each one easier to excuse than the last, until the person they had been was almost impossible to recognize.
Claire had warned me not to rewrite the past merely because the present frightened me. She said investigators would separate facts from memories and that I should do the same. I tried. I wrote down what Carmine had said during the weeks after the shooting: which visitors he had discouraged, which financial documents he had brought for my signature, and which doctors he had insisted were the only ones worth trusting. Some entries were ordinary. Others looked troubling now. I gave the list to Alvarez without crossing out the parts that embarrassed me. She thanked me for the honesty, then asked whether I had ever authorized intimidation against employees who questioned shipping records. I answered truthfully. The question was painful. So was the knowledge that she had every reason to ask.
In the kitchen, Margaret had laid out sandwiches nobody touched. One of the younger guards stood by the door, his hands trembling around a paper cup. He was new, hired after the shooting, and I realized he expected me to shout at him for failing to prevent the kidnapping. I asked his name. He said Peter. I asked whether he'd eaten. He shook his head. Margaret pushed a plate toward him before I could speak. He stared at both of us as though kindness were another form of interrogation. I wondered how many people in my household had learned to expect punishment before help. It was not a question I could blame on Carmine.
I sent a message to the staff explaining that the police were handling the investigation, that nobody should pursue suspects independently, and that anyone who felt unsafe could leave with pay. I read it twice before sending it. In my old life, I would have demanded loyalty as proof of courage. Now I understood that a person could be loyal and still refuse unnecessary danger. The message felt small against the enormity of Fay's disappearance. But small decisions had built the life I regretted, and perhaps small decisions could help build something different.
When I returned to the window, the lake had disappeared behind the dark. My hands hurt from gripping the rims of my chair. I loosened them one finger at a time and followed the breathing pattern Fay had taught me. It did not make me calm. It made me capable of thinking while afraid. That was enough. I called Alvarez with one more detail: the cold-storage building's power could be cut from a street-level cabinet, but doing so might disable its ventilation. She thanked me and said the team would account for that risk. I hung up, exhausted by the realization that helping meant offering information and trusting others to decide what to do with it.
The detective called back. The vehicle carrying Fay had been intercepted by a van using stolen police markings. One driver was injured but conscious. Traffic cameras had tracked the van toward the river warehouses. The police were moving in.
“Can you identify an old cold-storage facility on the east side?” he asked.
I could. It belonged to a company my father had acquired twenty years earlier. Carmine had handled its closure. I gave the detective the layout, including a service tunnel that opened onto a loading ramp. The detective thanked me and ended the call.
I waited beside the window while the city darkened. I could not force the minutes to pass. I could not intimidate a telephone into ringing. I could only stay useful and keep breathing.
Then a photograph arrived. Fay sat in a metal chair, her hands bound in front of her. She was bruised but upright, looking directly at the camera. Behind her, half hidden in shadow, stood a man with Ethan Willis's face.
Below the image were six words.
YOUR FRIEND KNOWS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.
May you like
I looked up at the security lights beyond the glass. For the first time, I feared not only that Carmine had betrayed me, but that he had betrayed Fay's brother too. And somewhere in the city, the woman who had taught me to face my own body without hatred was waiting for someone to believe her life mattered more than a criminal empire.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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