Chapter 5 - THE APARTMENT ON THE WEST SIDE
“Allesia. I found it.”
He had the phone pressed to his ear with one hand and his coat in the other, and Matteo was already at the door with the car keys.
“Don’t open it.”
“You already opened it.”
“Yes.”
“What does it say?”
She didn’t answer.
“Allesia, my father wrote your mother’s name.”
Dante stopped in the hallway.
“What?”
“Bianca Moretti.”
His grip tightened around the phone. Behind him, Matteo read his face and reached for his own coat.
“And Lorenzo Bellini.”
“What else?”
Alessia’s voice became quieter. “There’s a photograph.”
“Of what?”
“Your mother.”
“With Bellini?”
“No. With my father.”
Dante said nothing.
“There’s a date on the back,” she went on. “Three days before your mother died.”
“Send me the address.”
“I can bring it tomorrow—”
“Send me the address.”
She heard the change in his voice. Not anger. Fear.
“Dante.”
“Please.”
That word made her pause. She had never heard him use it. She was not sure he had ever used it with anyone.
She sent it.
Twenty-five minutes later, Dante Moretti walked into a small apartment on the west side of the city.
Alessia stood beside an old kitchen table. She was not in uniform now — a dark sweater, jeans, her hair loose over her shoulders — and for one strange second Dante realized he had never seen her dressed as anything except someone who worked in his house. She looked smaller and younger and entirely more dangerous, because she looked like a person.
Then he saw the photograph, and he stopped thinking about anything else.
Bianca Moretti stood beside Giovani Romano outside a warehouse. Both of them were young. Both of them were unsmiling. Bianca’s hand was on her father’s arm, and her father’s hand was flat against the wall of the building, as if he were holding it up.
On the back, in Bianca’s handwriting:
If anything happens to me, Giovani knows where the red ledger is. Do not trust Lorenzo.
Dante read it twice. Then a third time.
“Red ledger,” he said. “The folder from the safe.”
“You think it’s the same thing?”
“Yes.”
“Why would your mother trust my father?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked around the apartment. Old cabinets, boxes stacked against the wall, a photograph of a family on the refrigerator — Giovani, a woman Dante assumed was Alessia’s mother, and a girl of twelve or thirteen with dark hair and a serious face.
“Where did you find this?”
“Inside an old cookbook.”
“Anything else?”
A letter.
She handed it over. The handwriting was cramped and hurried, and it belonged to Giovani Romano.
Allesia. If you ever find this, I failed to keep a promise.
Bianca Moretti discovered money disappearing through companies controlled by men close to her husband. She believed Lorenzo Bellini was protecting someone. She asked me to make a copy of the accounts. I did.
After she died, I became afraid. I gave the original evidence back to the Moretti family and kept one copy where nobody would look.
The letter ended there.
Dante turned the page over. Nothing.
“Where nobody would look,” he said.
Alessia nodded.
“Any idea?”
“No.”
Dante studied the kitchen. Old cabinets, boxes, photographs.
Then Alessia looked at him.
“My father hated your family,” she said. “I told you that.”
“Yes.”
“What if he didn’t?”
Dante frowned. “What?”
“What if that’s just what he wanted us to believe?” She looked at the letter. “He told my mother never to contact anyone named Moretti. I thought it was hatred. Maybe it was protection.”
The same realization passed between them, and neither of them said it out loud: someone had killed Bianca. Someone had frightened Giovani Romano into silence. And eleven years later, someone had opened Bianca’s hidden safe and taken the red folder.
Dante’s phone rang.
Matteo.
“Talk.”
“We have a problem.”
“What?”
“Bellini’s gone.”
Dante’s face hardened.
“How?”
“Guest wing window. Camera loop.”
“Find him.”
“Already moving.”
Dante ended the call.
Alessia understood. “He ran.”
“Yes.”
“Then he did it.”
“Maybe.”
She frowned. “You still aren’t sure.”
“Running proves fear,” Dante said. “Not guilt.”
“Sometimes they’re the same.”
“Sometimes they aren’t.”
A sound came from the hallway.
Dante moved instantly. He stepped between Alessia and the door, and she noticed, and something about the way he did it — without thinking, without hesitating — stayed with her longer than it should have.
The sound came again. A floorboard.
Then a knock.
Three slow taps.
Dante reached beneath his jacket but did not draw anything.
“Who is it?”
No answer.
Another knock.
Alessia whispered. “Nobody knows I’m here.”
Dante looked at her. “Someone does.”
He opened the door.
The hallway was empty.
On the floor sat a red envelope.
He picked it up carefully, by the corner, and turned it over. Inside was a key — small, old, brass — and a folded note.
Giovani kept his promise.
May you like
Below it, in different handwriting:
The maid knows where to look.
