Chapter 10
Marco arrived at six twelve.
His face was arranged perfectly.
He strode into the study with his coat still on, hair wind-tossed, breathing a little hard, as if he had run the last flight of stairs. He looked at Dante. He looked at Anna, standing by the window with reddened eyes and the yellow coat folded in her arms.
He crossed to her first.
“Mrs. Carter. Dear God. Enzo radioed in from the school. I just heard —”
“Tell me everything,” Anna said.
She did not have to perform. She handed him the coat with hands that trembled, and the trembling was real, and she said, “Please. Please find her.”
Marco took the coat. He pressed it to his chest with both hands.
“I will not sleep until she is home. You have my word.”
He turned to Dante. His voice shifted into an operational register.
“Boss. We should not act yet. Whoever took her wants something. If we flood the streets, they will panic and the child will not come back. Let me put feelers out through the quiet channels. Let me offer a negotiation. I can have a line open within three hours.”
Dante allowed a long pause.
Then he nodded once, as if the suggestion were costing him something.
“Do it. Keep me informed every hour. On the hour.”
“Yes, boss.”
Marco left with the coat.
Dante waited until the sound of the car door closing drifted up from the gravel.
Then he picked up a different phone from a drawer in the desk and placed three calls.
The first was to Luca.
The second was to a man named Raphael, who ran security at the Moretti family’s dock warehouse and had served with Luca in the army.
The third was to a woman named Teresa, who had been Dante’s father’s bookkeeper for twenty-two years, and who kept a small apartment in the North End where no one but Dante knew the address.
Each call was under forty seconds.
By the time Marco Bellini pulled onto Storrow Drive with Sophie’s yellow coat on the passenger seat, three unmarked vehicles were already pacing him at a distance of two blocks, and a small green dot had begun blinking on a tablet in Dante Moretti’s locked drawer.
The green dot moved east.
Dante stood over the tablet and watched it travel along Storrow, cross the bridge, turn south at the interchange, and begin tracking down toward the harbor.
He did not blink.
Anna stood beside him. Neither of them spoke.
At six forty-one, the dot slowed.
At six forty-three, it stopped.
Luca’s voice came through the earpiece Dante had slipped on five minutes earlier.
“Boss. He is parked at the gate of a warehouse on Northern Avenue. Pier 7. The building is registered to a shell. The shell traces back to Helix Nova in two jumps.”
Dante looked at Anna.
“Pier 7,” she said quietly. “That is one of the addresses in the ledger.”
“How many entrances?”
“Two. A front loading bay and a side door at the north wall. A steel staircase from the loading bay up the back wall to the second floor. A service stairwell on the east side that runs from the side door to the second floor and the roof. The upper floor is one open space with offices along the south.”
“How do you know this?”
“The architectural filings were in the drive. Adrien Cross keeps them in every property folder. I memorized the ones I thought I would need.”
Dante allowed himself half a second of pure appreciation.
He pressed the earpiece.
“Raphael. Pier 7, Northern Avenue. Two teams. One takes the loading bay and the steel staircase, silent approach. The other holds the perimeter. We go in by the side door and the east stairwell. Do not move until I am there. If anyone leaves the building before I arrive, you let them walk fifty feet, and then you take them alive.”
“Yes, boss.”
Dante removed the earpiece. He turned to the gun safe behind the bookcase, opened it, and took out a flat black pistol he had not held in nine years.
He checked it. He slid a magazine in.
“I am going with you,” Anna said.
He did not look up.
“No, Mrs. Carter.”
“My daughter is in that building.”
“That is why.” He seated the magazine. “If something goes wrong, Sophie needs a mother alive at the end of it. Not two bodies in a warehouse.”
“No, Mr. Moretti.” Anna crossed the room. She stopped on the other side of the desk from him. Her face was pale. Her hands were steady. The tears from the study had been washed off, and what was underneath was something harder and older and did not belong to a woman who cleaned floors. “You cannot ask me to wait in a house while my child sits in a chair.”
“Mrs. Carter —”
“Mr. Moretti. Look at me.”
May you like
He looked.
“My child. I go.”
