“Yes.”
“Scarlatti could have been handled better.”
“Mistakes tend to happen when we’re working against the clock.”
“You mean the storm?”
“The curfew. And the fact that one of our men was driving Scarlatti’s police car. He couldn’t afford to get stopped, so he dumped the cruiser early. All things considered, they did well.”
“What about Tait?”
“He was easier. He won’t be found.” He turned to her. “Do you understand why we dealt with them differently?”
“I’m listening.”
“If both were found dead on the same night, someone might have made a connection.”
Lucy completed the thought. “Or … if both of them disappeared on the same night, same result.”
“You have fine instincts, my dear.”
“Fine might not be exactly the right word. I’m sitting with New Jersey’s most feared capo famiglia discussing our recent killings.”
Dominic grunted. “Good point.”
“Can we get back to why I’m here?”
“Because someone may have already connected those two.”
Lucy’s stomach tightened. “You mean Robert?”
Dominic didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“You told me not to call him. But we’re leaving for Sicily tonight, and he’s arriving here on Thursday night for a conference. He expects to see me, so I need to tell him something.”
“A conference. Is that what he said?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Before we get to that, do you remember Tigrane Holdings?”
“The shell company in Delaware.”
“We know who’s behind it.”
“How did you get that information when the FBI couldn’t?”
“We found Parnell, the manager of that wrecking yard. Squeezed him. Not gently, I admit,” he added, with a pat on her leg, “but no lasting damage. He gave us the final link, from Tigrane in Delaware to a company in Belize.” He handed her a folded sheet of paper. “Names, shareholdings.”
Lucy unfolded the paper. She read out loud. “Noel Parnell, Carla Scarlatti, Ernest Tait … fifteen, fifteen, fifteen. Raffaello Mazzara … fifty-five percent?” She straightened. “Mazzara?”
“He’s one of Antonio’s nephews. He dropped out of sight years ago.”
“Does this have something to do with our trip to Sicily?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“You always say that! Tell me how taking my father back to Sicily will—?”
He cut her off. “First, I have something else to show you.” He unhooked his cell phone from his belt and handed it to her. “Watch the video.”
There was a single video saved in the phone’s library.
Lucy thumbed play.
The opening footage shocked her. After a few seconds, she hit pause and studied the frozen frame. She was looking at a man in a police officer’s uniform. From the angle, she couldn’t read his shoulder patch. He was tied to a heavy chair, and appeared to be unconscious. His mouth was duct-taped, but what appeared to be a long drinking straw led from under the tape to a breast pocket in his tunic. The pocket bulged with a rectangular shape.
“I asked the boys to record that. For you.”
“For me?”
“To show you that no one was hurt. That we don’t kill without good reason.”
“He looks in bad shape.”
“Pentothal. The shot wears off in fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“What’s with the straw?”
“Pentothal can leave you with a hell of a thirst. They put a juice box in his pocket.”
“Who is he?”
“Night security at the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office.”
Lucy gaped at him. “The one on Duncan Avenue?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where Robert’s office is!”
“That’s why they were there.”
“A lot of cops work in that building!”
“Not at four in the morning.”
Lucy re-started the video. She watched with rising concern as the camera navigated familiar hallways.
“What about the alarm system? Security cameras?”
“All taken care of. We learned our techniques from the best.”
“Who?”
“The FBI. They have tech guys; so do we. Twenty-first century, remember?”
As if to prove Dominic’s point, a member of his entry crew came into view on screen. The man was wearing a swat hood and surgical gloves. He swiftly bypassed the lock and entered Robert’s office.
“When was this?” Lucy asked.
“Four nights ago.”
“Why?”
“Keep watching.”
The lockman walked directly to Robert’s desk, knelt down, and opened the door in the right-hand pedestal, revealing the hotel-style room safe hidden behind it. Using a flashlight, he examined the safe closely. Then he tapped in a code on the keypad. The safe door opened.
“How did he know the combination?”
“He didn’t. Every one of those safes has a default master code when it’s shipped. It’s a feature designed for emergencies. It can be re-set after delivery, but most hotel managers can’t be bothered. They hang on to the original master code as a backup in case guests forget the one they set and can’t retrieve their valuables. We took a chance that your friend never bothered to change the default.”
“Is every manufacturer’s code the same?”
“No. But my man knows them all.”
As Lucy watched, Dominic’s man removed something from the safe. It was the exhibit envelope that held the USB drive that Jack had hidden in their house. The field of view expanded as the camera zoomed in for a close-up.
The seal on the envelope had been broken.
The man reached back into the safe. One by one, he removed its contents and laid them out in sequence on Olivetti’s desk: a notebook, a typed document that appeared to be a chronology, a booklet of photographs, copies of birth certificates, an airline flight itinerary …
Abruptly, the video ended.
“Go to the still library. He photographed everything.”
A few minutes of reading and scanning was enough. Lucy immediately understood the full extent of her peril. Ashen-faced and numb with shock, she sagged against Dominic Lanza. He slid a protective arm around her shoulders.
He waited.
He waited for what his careful observations of Lucinda Arianna Tartaglia assured him would come next.
Lucy let out a long, rattling breath. “He’ll know he was the target of the break-in.”
“Doubtful. They didn’t leave a paper clip out of place.”
“So what? They drugged a cop!”
“There are more obvious targets in that building than a prosecutor’s office. There’s a homicide unit, a gang unit, and a narcotics squad. Our people used a pry bar to break into a room on the second floor. It’s where they keep court exhibits. They loaded a knapsack with drugs and guns. The cops are chasing their tails, trying to figure out if it was random, or if someone went in there to help out a particular defendant.”
Lucy didn’t speak, didn’t move.
“Lucy, I’m truly sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t. I went in with my eyes open.”
“Maybe, but now I’m going to make sure I get you out.”
She twisted to face him, leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek. She fixed him with her eyes, hard and cold as malachite, and said: “Let’s get something straight right now. We’ll be doing that together.”
Dominic’s patience had been rewarded, as he’d known it would be. “Good,” he said. “We’ll need you.”
“You told my sister the risk to our father was low.”
“Why worry her?”
“You don’t mind worrying me,” she observed.
“You’r
e different, Lucy.”
A second passed.
“I am, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“You have a plan.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m already included in it.”
“Yes.”
“Does my father know?”
“Not every detail. In his condition, I didn’t—”
“—want to stress him.”
He nodded.
“So how is this going to work?”
“I’ll explain everything on the plane.”
“No, explain it to me now,” Lucy ordered. “And don’t hold anything back.”
And so he did.
For the last few minutes, Carlo had been keeping an eye on his boss. He knew what was being discussed, and he was watching for the young woman’s reaction. For that reason, he didn’t appear to notice a tourist standing under a massive, vine-choked oak a few hundred feet away. The man was holding a camera, and it was pointed in their direction.
The man’s name was Raffaello Mazzara.
36
“But why such short notice?”
“The opportunity just came up! He’s an old friend of Dad’s who made it big in some kind of tech business. Something to do with renewable energy. He’d already scheduled this charter, and he’d heard my father was pretty sick so, out of the blue, he showed up and offered to take him along. Dad figured it’s his one last chance to see home, so he agreed. I’m used to helping out with his oxygen and meds, so I’m elected to go as his nurse. I’m scrambling right now to get us both packed.”
Lucy kept her tone upbeat and the lies rolled on, but she didn’t flinch. From here on it would all be lies.
“When are you back?”
“Not sure. Four or five days … maybe a week.”
“So you might get back when I’m still in Florida?”
“Hope so, but I can’t promise. I’ll call as soon as I know.”
“Okay. I guess you’ve got to do this, but I’m really disappointed. I miss you, Lucy.”
Sure you do, you scheming bastard …
“I miss you, too.”
“I’m in love with you. You know that, don’t you?”
Lucy felt her gorge rise. She forced herself to stay silent, to let a few seconds go by, and to make sure there was no telltale tremor in her voice. “Love you, too,” she replied brightly. “I’ll talk to you soon.” She ended the call.
Lucy had been pacing back and forth on the patio of her dad’s apartment, with Ricki watching the unfolding conversation from a chair. Their father was inside, taking a nap.
“Bit of storytelling going on there,” Ricki observed. “Renewable energy?”
“I can’t trust him anymore.”
“Oh, yeah? ‘Love you, too’? ‘Call you soon’?”
“He can’t know what I’m doing.”
“You mean, what you’re really doing.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve been acting like this guy was capital-T, capital-O, The One. Like you’d finally moved on. Meeting the family … Amelia Island … what was all that?”
“Sis…”
“What?”
“There are things you need to know. About Bayonne.”
“Yesterday you said I don’t want to know. What changed?”
“I met with Dominic this morning.”
“And?”
“And, if Dad and I don’t come back from Sicily, things might get a bit uncomfortable for you and Jeff.”
“What do you mean, ‘don’t come back’?”
“We’re going there to fix something. If it doesn’t work, you might receive a visit. An unwelcome visit. You need to be ready.”
Ricki studied her sister’s face. “Am I going to need a drink?”
“Maybe more than one.”
They opened a bottle of Chianti, and Lucy began.
She told her everything.
When she finished, Ricki sat very still, staring, her fists clenched, her face a kinetic mix of fear, amazement, and mystified respect.
Then Lucy witnessed something she hadn’t seen since the day their mother died.
Her sister wept.
Erica Barnett, née Cappelli, née Tartaglia, wept uncontrollably for one long minute. Then she stood up, wiped her eyes, hugged her sister so hard she nearly crushed the breath out of her, and went inside to sit by their father’s bed.
* * *
Two hours later, Carlo delivered Dominic, Lucy, and Joseph to Kendall Executive Airport.
37
Just before noon on Monday, the Gulfstream G550 made a long banking turn past the lava-blasted slopes of Mount Etna and landed at Catania-Fontanarossa Airport.
Dominic had given Lucy’s father the aft stateroom and he’d slept like a baby. The flight had taken eleven hours, and he’d slumbered on through eight of them. Oddly, he had slept more soundly on the jet than he normally did at home.
But Lucy was exhausted. She’d lain on her divan in the main cabin, restlessly thinking and reviewing and preparing. She’d only dozed in snatches, and now she was worried that jet lag was going to undermine her faculties just when she needed them most.
After they disembarked, Dominic took the lead, piloting Joseph’s wheelchair, and fast-tracking them through the formalities in fluent Italian. Within twenty minutes of touchdown, they were exiting into the cavernous main terminal. The noisy, teeming foreignness of it all was the first thing that struck Lucy—the babel of languages and the unfamiliar smells assaulted her unprepared senses. Outside, they were met by a beefy character named Lucca. His oily hair, pockmarked face, and vulpine eyes made him look like a walking mugshot. Ignoring Lucy and her father, he spoke only to Dominic as he led them to a waiting seven-passenger BMW X5. Despite Lucy’s draining fatigue, she couldn’t resist pointing out to Dominic that their guide looked a bit more stereotypical than she’d expected.
“Not exactly the twenty-first-century look you’ve been advocating,” she murmured.
He shrugged. “It’s the old country, Lucy. They live under the weight of generations.”
“Is this guy a relation?”
“Third cousin. Maybe fourth. Don’t remember which.”
But Dominic’s reply barely registered in Lucy’s weary brain because she had just seen an apparition.
At first, he’d been a tall man angling through a swamp of tourists milling around a row of tour buses. A tall man with a familiar build. A familiar gait.
Then she’d glimpsed his face.
Jack’s face.
Jack’s eyes, watching her.
Jack, smiling his love.
And then the face was gone.
It wasn’t Jack. It couldn’t be him, and it wasn’t. Lucy knew it. Maybe it was a man who resembled him. A man who had noticed an attractive woman, and smiled.
That was it. She was just hallucinating from lack of sleep.
Unaccountably, the experience calmed her. Because of that fantasy of Jack, that fleeting illusion of the beautiful man whose life had so thoroughly suffused her own, she was able to relax on the long drive to their destination.
Not just relax. Sleep.
She conked out before they hit the autostrada. She didn’t stir until the car came to a stop, ninety minutes later, in front of a huge ironwork gate just off Strada Statale 640, ten minutes past Caltanissetta on the road to Agrigento. She awoke just in time to see the gate swing silently inward, revealing two unsmiling men sauntering toward them, each carrying a lupara. That sight brought her upright and fully alert, generating a laugh from both Dominic and her father. She suppressed an ill-tempered impulse to chide them both about yet another throwback scene, this time from The Godfather.
The two armed men bent to scrutinize their faces, and then nodded for Lucca to drive through. A long unpaved driveway wound through ordered groves of olive, past a dark mass of irregular outbuildings, and finally arrived at a second, smaller gate, this one set in a high, vine-covered stone wall. As th
ey approached, the gate swung open and they eased into a paved courtyard. On three sides rose the walls of an attractive manor house; on the fourth, a long, low building with a tiled roof sealed the quadrangle.
An erect old man with white hair stood waiting. He was holding a cane with a silver handle. At his side was a slender, good-looking young man in his thirties.
“That’s Silvio?” Joseph asked, referring to the older of the two.
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t have recognized him.”
“The years are not always kind, Joseph,” Dominic replied.
“I guess I’m proof of that.”
Forty years earlier, at the safe house near Gangi, Silvio Lanza had been entrusted with the lives of Joseph and Giulia Tartaglia. According to Joseph, he’d been quick and resourceful, and an attentive host to the endangered couple. Today, assisted by his son, he presided over eighteen hundred hectares of orchards and vineyards. Before they left Miami, Dominic had explained that Silvio would again act as host, only this time in more comfortable surroundings.
Silvio and Dominic embraced and kissed cheeks. Then, while Lucca retrieved Joseph’s wheelchair from the back, Joseph approached his former protector on uncertain legs. They embraced and kissed cheeks with much emotion.
“And dear Giulia?” Silvio asked in Italian. “I am told that she passed.”
“Yes. It’s been many years now.”
“She was a fine, fine woman, Giuseppe. I am truly sorry.”
“Thank you.”
Silvio turned to Lucy, and switched to English. “And this beautiful young woman is your daughter?”
“This is Lucinda. Our youngest.”
“You are most welcome in our home, Lucinda.” He leaned closer. “But I must warn you to beware of Nicolò,” he added, in a theatrical whisper. “He seems to have taken great interest in your arrival.”
Pointedly, Silvio now took his own sweet time, introducing his son to each of the men in the party. When at last he came to Lucy, Nicolò interrupted. He took Lucy’s hand, squeezed it gently, and said in unaccented English, “Please. Just call me Nicci.”
“I’m Lucy,” she replied, smiling.
“It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“And you, Nicci.”
With that, everyone went inside.
The vast manor house was a miracle of simplicity and charm. Nicci commandeered Lucy and, with obvious pleasure, he took her on a fifteen-minute tour through corridors paved in marble, finely appointed sitting rooms, a chapel lit by lofty windows of colored glass, a vast kitchen and pantry, a cavernous wine cellar, and a dining room filled with antiques—the latter rendered more fascinating by a row of wall niches displaying brightly colored ceramics.
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