Beautiful Revenge

by Sienna Blake

  Ten minutes later we had parked and were walking down an alleyway in Little Italy. The smell of rotting cabbage and sour fish hit my nostrils, making me scrunch up my nose. This alley backed up a large Italian restaurant called La Cucina that specialized in wood-fired pizzas. Best pizza in the city, in my opinion. We signed in with the officer manning the crime scene perimeter, pulled on shoe booties and snapped on rubber gloves.

  “After you,” Espinoza hiked up the yellow crime scene tape for me that had been strung across the alley.

  “Nice to see chivalry isn’t dead,” I teased.

  Lacey, our newest and youngest medical examiner, was already at the scene. Young, only in her early thirties, she had moved in from out of state. Rumor had it she had graduated with a doctorate in forensic pathology from Harvard Medical School. From my dealings with her, she was thorough, sharp and professional. Best of all, she didn’t take any shit from anybody, most of all because she was a woman of color. She was bent over a body, her thick dark hair tied back from her pretty chocolate-skinned face.

  Espo let out a low whistle. He was staring at Lacey’s ass.

  I slapped his arm. “Are you really ogling her at a crime scene?”

  “What?” Espo gave me one of his trademark “I’m so innocent and even if I weren’t you still love me” grins.

  I rolled my eyes. “You are hopeless.”

  “Hopelessly in love.”

  “You’re hopelessly in love at least once a week.”

  “Nu-uh. Put in a good word for me?”

  I shook my head firmly and gave him what I hoped was a “leave her alone” glare. I sidled up to Lacey and said a quick hello. From what I could see, the body was male, laying on his back, wearing dark slacks and a dark shirt, soaked with blood. His face was turned away, his clothes torn and he’d been beaten up before he died.

  “Morning, beautiful,” Espinoza said, flashing Lacey a grin. Obviously, my glare wasn’t scary enough. “What do you have for us?”

  Lacey shook her head, the hint of a blush playing at her cheeks. “This man was tortured, brutally, before he died. Cause of death was the gunshot wound to the head.” She pointed to his forehead. I moved around the body to get a better look. His face was like an overripe grape, purple and engorged, eyes almost completely swollen shut, lips busted up, a small dark bullet wound on his forehead.

  “There’s no blood pooling around the body, indicating he was shot somewhere else and dumped here,” continued Lacey. “Lividity also confirms he was moved.”

  I nodded. There were dirt and smears of something oily around him but no blood. “Time of death?”

  “I won’t know for certain until I get him back to the lab. Based on liver temp and the ambient temperature of this alleyway, I’m estimating sometime on Sunday night.

  I leaned down to feel in his pockets. They were totally empty. “No wallet. No I.D. No phone.”

  “No eyes on the alleyway,” Espo said, indicating the lack of security cameras. “Maybe one of the nearby traffic cams caught something. I’ll get uniforms to start canvassing the area for witnesses.”

  “You won’t get anything,” I said, a heavy feeling in my chest. Verona’s Little Italy was filled with undocumented workers and people hiding from authorities. The locals were notorious for turning a blind eye and keeping their mouths shut. This body dump was a pro job, cold and calculated.

  “I know,” said Espo. “But we have to try.”

  I nodded. “We have to try.”

  “Ligature marks around his wrists and ankles suggested he was tied up for a while,” Lacey pushed up the sleeves to reveal the bruising around his wrists. “And he’s missing fingers…”

  I shuddered as I counted three, four, five missing digits. “Have we found the fingers?”

  “Not yet. The techies are still looking.”

  Around the alley, three crime scene techs scoured the area, one of them with a camera in her hand, snapping pictures.

  “So…he was tied up, beaten, tortured, then killed with a single gunshot to the forehead, execution-style, then dumped. This was a professional hit. They wanted something from him before they killed him.” I spotted something. “He has a tan line on his left ring finger. A ring was there. He was married.”

  Lacey let out a whispered curse. “I hope he doesn’t have kids.”

  “Let’s hope not.” A heaviness descended on me. I knew what it was like to lose a parent like this. “Hey, Espo,” I called over to him. He was standing over at a dumpster talking to a crime scene tech who was digging around inside. “Any luck with I.D. in the dumpster?”

  “No.” Espo jogged back over and walked around the body so he could see the victim’s face. He scrunched up his nose and tilted his head. “This badly beaten, it’s going to be a bust trying to do facial recognition against the missing person database. I doubt his own mother could recognize him now.”

  “I had his fingerprints scanned,” Lacey said. “Or at least, what fingerprints he had left. One of the techs is running them now.”

  “So far no gun in the dumpsters either,” said Espo. “Though I doubt the boys will find anything there.

  I nodded. “This killer was too smart to throw the weapon away near where the body was dumped.”

  “No casings have turned up either.”

  “And there’s about a million pieces of trace evidence around him,” I said, pointing to the grit, oil, and food waste around him. “Maybe forensics will find something on the body.”

  My phone beeped in my pocket, so I pulled it out.

  Dad: Don’t let me down.

  He’d specifically assigned me to this case. Determination knotted in my throat as I tucked my phone away. I would not let him down.

  “We’ve got a hit off the database,” someone called. A crime scene tech, a young man, came jogging over with a palm-sized machine. “He’s in the system.”

  “Vincent Torrito, or Vinnie to his friends,” Espo read off the screen. Above the text was a small arrest photograph showing a rough-looking man, mid-thirties, with hair cropped close to his skull, a disfigured nose from being broken several times, and a stud showing in his ear. “And boy, does he have some bad, bad friends.”

  “Now I recognize him,” I said. “He’s one of Veronesi’s men, a known mid-level dealer. Vice picked him up a week ago on drug charges and captain got a chance to interrogate him about the murder of Tyrell’s son.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Espo. “The massacre down at the docks at the Tyrell’s warehouse? Vinnie didn’t say shit as far as I remember.”

  “Of course, the Veronesis are denying any involvement.” None of the mob members would talk to the police, not even about a rival family. They had their own style of justice and judgment. I stared down at the dead man. Whatever he knew, he was truly silent now. “Vinnie didn’t talk to us, but…somebody thought he knew something.”

  Espo cursed. “Two weeks ago the Veronesis supposedly gun down Jacob Tyrell. Now a Veronesi body turns up. This fucking thing is going to blow up into an all-out war.”

  * * *

  The canvas of the neighborhood turned up nothing, as expected. Nobody heard or saw anything Sunday night.

  Once the body was back in the morgue, Lacey narrowed time of death down to between seven thirty and ten o’clock Sunday night. The body hadn’t been there when a restaurant worker had gone out for a cigarette at eleven p.m. Sunday night. When another worker had taken out the trash first thing Monday morning at seven minutes after five, he’d found the body, so it’d been dumped between those hours.

  During a tearful interview with Mrs. Torrito at her home, a one-bedroom apartment in a rough Verona neighborhood, we’d found out that Vinnie had left the apartment on Friday night without telling her where he was going. He hadn’t come back.

  When I asked her why she hadn’t reported him missing, she shook her head. “He goes off sometimes. Comes back a few nights later, sometimes banged up, but he always comes back. He wouldn’t just leave J
immy and Jake.”

  His kids.

  Jimmy and Jake clung to their mother’s side as she cried, both watching me with solemn round eyes. The boys were seven and nine, and I prayed to hell they didn’t know what their father was when he had been alive.

  Vinnie’s car, a black sedan, was also missing and currently unaccounted for.

  I came into the station early Tuesday morning to find the place a hive. A canvas of the nearby traffic cameras turned up footage of several vehicles driving around the area between eleven p.m. and five-oh-seven a.m. We ran the license plates on the vehicles. Only one name stood out. A black Escalade was seen driving into the area in the body drop window, at around two a.m. The Escalade’s windows were tinted and the security footage was grainy, so we couldn’t get a visual on the driver and passenger. It was registered to none other than Tyrell Industries, a company owned by the Tyrell family, one of the ruling mob empires this side of the country.

  “Let’s round up Giovanni Tyrell,” I said as I stared at the still of the black Escalade on the large screen in the tech room.

  “And his son,” said Espinoza, standing beside me and chewing on a lollipop stick.

  “His son?”

  “Word on the street is, since Jacob died, the youngest son has been recalled back into the fold. The prodigal son has returned and there’s a new heir to the throne. The new Prince of Darkness has come home.”

  20

  ____________

  Roman

  I woke up with rough hands shaking me, then a slap on the face.

  “Fuck you,” I muttered to my assaulter. “When I wake up properly, you’re dead.” Fuck, my head hurt. What time was it? Hell, what day was it?

  I attempted to open my bleary eyes. My cousin, Benvolio, was glaring at me like I was a petulant child late for school. He looked like the rest of us Tyrells, a generous crop of dark hair, strong jaw, dark hooded eyes and a permanent snarl to his lips. “Wake up, fucker,” Benvolio slapped my face again. “Have a shower and get dressed.”

  I shoved him back so he couldn’t hit me again and sat up, rubbing my face. Sometime last night I had passed out on the couch in the living room of my new apartment, all three bedrooms of opulence, cold and impersonal like a hotel. My foot kicked at an empty bottle of Jack across the plush cream rug. “Where’s the fire?” I grumbled.

  “The cops are coming to take you to the station.”

  Cops? A shot of adrenaline rushed through me. Now I was awake. “What?”

  Benvolio rolled his eyes. “Shower. Now. A Tyrell never goes in public without wearing suitable attire. Reputation is everything.” He pointed to the fresh suit still in its dry-cleaning plastic, hung across the back of a straight-backed dining room chair.

  Reputation is everything. I snorted. “You’re sounding more and more like my old man every day.”

  Benvolio’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not sounding enough like him.”

  I gritted my teeth. For a long moment, we glared at each other, Benvolio hating me because I was next in line to the Tyrell throne, me hating him because he wasn’t.

  Benvolio pointed towards my bathroom. “Shower. Go.”

  “What? You’re not going to wash my ass for me?”

  “I don’t get paid enough to wash your fucking ass. Why don’t you get one of your groupies to do it for you? Speaking of groupies, why are you alone? Shouldn’t you have a naked girl or three draped over your dick?”

  I snorted. “What the fuck do you know?”

  “Please. Your sordid reputation in Europe even reached us in Verona.”

  I didn’t answer him. I got up, walked to the bathroom, and tried not to barf all over the pristine cream marble tiles. In the shower, I let the hot water run over me. I felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my body. My muscles ached. My head throbbed.

  What hurt worst wasn’t physical. I felt raw and torn, a mere cavity inside me where my soul had been, where hope had once lain. Not even that pretty and willing blonde from the other night could soothe me.

  After I got her back to this apartment, Rachel, or whatever her name was, had begun to undress. I’d stood there drinking straight from the bottle. I kept comparing her to Julianna. Her tan was fake, not like Julianna’s smooth, natural glow. Her body was too skinny and I could feel her ribs when she pressed up against me, not like Julianna’s soft, warm flesh and perfect natural curves.

  I reached for the blonde’s lips anyway, praying that they would quiet the noise in my head like Julianna’s had.

  They hadn’t. The world still whirled around me, the voices—mine, my mother’s, my father’s—all yelling at me in my head. I needed peace and peace was in Julianna’s touch.

  But I couldn’t have her. Not now. Not anymore.

  I tore my mouth away from the blonde and let out a growl of frustration as I pushed her off me. She let out a whine of disapproval.

  “I can’t do this,” I told her.

  She stared at me, wide eyes looking pained, then she glanced down. I was totally flaccid. “You drank too much?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. Let her think that. I hoped it would make her feel better when I kicked her out.

  She wouldn’t take the hint. “I can fix that for you.” She pressed up against me, her hand shoving down into the front of my pants. Even in her palm, my dick was limp.

  Julianna.

  Julianna Julianna Julianna. That’s all my fucking body was crying out for. She was a drug that I’d somehow become addicted too. Nothing else would satisfy me. The gorgeous woman with the whiskey-colored eyes had ruined me.

  “You should go,” I said to the blonde.

  She left in a huff, refusing the wad of cash I handed out to her. “I am not a fucking hooker,” she yelled at me.

  “It’s for your cab.”

  She slammed the door behind her and it rattled in its frame.

  I took my bottle of Jack and sank into the deck chair out on the main balcony and stared up at the stars.

  When I was a boy, when my mother was alive, she used to lie out under the stars on a blanket with me, and we’d pick out constellations. She’d pick out one, a real one, then I’d pick out one. I used to make mine up, but she never let on, pretending that she saw them too.

  Julianna had shone brighter than the stars to me. A perfect constellation. I had to let her go. Because I didn’t deserve her. She didn’t deserve me.

  I shut my eyes, wishing I was somewhere else. I drank until it all went black.

  I turned off my shower, forcing myself back to the present.

  When the police knocked on my door, I answered it, pressed and polished in a tailored Armani suit. It had been Jacob’s and now it was mine. Apparently, I had grown to fill it out in the eight years I’d been gone.

  I greeted the uniforms at my door with cold civility. They seemed surprised to see that I was ready and waiting for them. They should know by now that nothing went on in Verona without the Tyrells knowing about it. My father had friends and little birdies in all sorts of places.

  I traveled to the police station with Benvolio driving his Escalade, the police car behind us, with another black SUV following us at a distance with two other hired men. No Tyrell would be caught dead in the back of a police car like a common criminal.

  In the car, Benvolio spoke only to tell me, “Your father has already been summoned to the station too.”

  “Great. A father and son excursion.”

  I ignored Benvolio’s look.

  Verona’s main police station was a solid five-level building that took up half of a block, a parking lot located out the back. After I exited the car, I was escorted by two officers to the third floor where, apparently, I would be interrogated. Benvolio and the hired men remained outside.

  As I strode down the corridors of the police station to the interrogation room, the other police officers flinched away from me. I could sense their fear; I could almost smell it. Fear because of who my family was. Who they thought I was. The
addictive rush of power swirled in my veins before I could stop it. I lifted my chin and glared back at these officers of the law, looking my natural enemies straight in the eyes.

  I was a Tyrell. I had learned how to lie to the world. It was lie or die.

  I was shown into a tiny interrogation room where I folded my body into a plastic chair at a table, two chairs opposite me. The room smelled musty and slightly of sweat. How many criminals had they broken in this very chair? They would not break me. They would not break a Tyrell.

  I faced a large mirror that took up almost the entire wall and wondered how many of them would be watching through the one-way glass. I smirked into the mirror and spent some time rearranging my hair that was still perfectly in place. I noted a small video camera in the top right-hand corner of the room, also trained on me.

  They made me wait a whole forty minutes before the door opened and a male Hispanic detective walked in. It was an interrogation technique, making the interviewee sweat. It wasn’t going to work on me. If they had anything on me, I’d have been arrested. I repressed the emotions and questions swirling around inside me.

  He sat opposite me and placed a manila file on the table top. I hid my curiosity as to what was contained within. I suspected enough.

  “I’m Detective Espinoza,” he said, folding his hands and placing them over the folder. He was a baby-faced guy, olive-skinned, round cheeks softening the hardness to his eyes. I suspected this detective wasn’t one to be fucked with.

  I stared at him for a few seconds, refusing to blink or show any emotion. A Tyrell never shows fear.

  “You want to tell me what this is about, detective?”

  “Just some questions.”

  I lifted my ankle onto my other knee and leaned back in the chair, placing my arm along the back of the chair beside me, acting as comfortable as if this place was my own personal living room. Like he was my guest. “By all means. Ask away.”

  “We’re waiting for my partner.”

  The door opened to the right of me. This must be the partner. I turned in my chair to get a glimpse of the poor schmuck. My heart slammed against my chest at the sight of the woman in the doorway. Whiskey-colored eyes of my dreams. Perfect honey-gold hair pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, a conservative gray pantsuit covering the most incredible body that I’d ever laid my hands on.