Chapter 3 - THE MAN WHO WORE A DEAD MAN'S WATCH
By the time the hospital discharged me two days later, Chicago had turned cold and bright. Sunlight bounced off the river like broken glass. Every pedestrian seemed to be rushing toward a life that made sense, while mine had become a series of unanswered questions written on evidence labels.
The toxicology report confirmed a sedative had been added to Luca's wine. The doctors said it could have caused serious impairment, especially if combined with alcohol. That was all they could responsibly conclude. Vanessa had not been accused of intending murder. Yet she had assaulted me, lied about the glass, and tried to make an archive disappear, and those facts were enough to keep Detective Alvarez busy.
I moved temporarily into a small furnished apartment near the hospital. Luca's attorney offered the estate guest wing, but I declined. I'd had enough of corridors with doors someone else could lock. The apartment belonged to a nonprofit housing program for witnesses and victims, and the rent arrangement was written down in plain language. My father stayed one floor below me.
“It's the first time you've lived above me since you were six,” he said while helping me arrange canned soup in the cupboard.
“Back then you didn't need a cane to carry groceries.”
“And back then you didn't try to drink a suspicious glass of wine.”
“I know,” I said for the tenth time.
He softened. “I keep saying it because I want you around long enough to get tired of me.”
I hugged him. The movement tugged at my stitches, but it was worth it.
That afternoon Alvarez asked me to come to the station for a follow-up interview. Luca was there as a separate witness. I was relieved to see him waiting in the public lobby rather than behind some mysterious closed door. He wore a charcoal sweater and dark trousers, nothing like the formal clothes he'd worn at the engagement dinner.
“You look better,” he said.
“I feel like someone drove a truck over me, then backed up to check.”
For the first time, he laughed. It was a quiet, surprised sound. “I'll take that as improvement.”
Alvarez brought us into a conference room, where photographs covered one wall. There was Victor Sloane as he had appeared nine years earlier, his dark hair combed back and his jaw set. Beside it was the image of Dr. Vincent Shaw, silver at the temples, heavier through the face, but unmistakably the same man once I saw them together.
“Facial comparison supports the identification,” Alvarez said. “We're verifying documents and movements. The man used at least two identities. The clinic financing under the Shaw name is being examined.”
“Has he been arrested?” Luca asked.
“Not yet. We have investigators looking for him. We don't release every step of an active search.”
Luca nodded, though his fingers tightened around a paper coffee cup.
She explained that the wine broker, Keller, had provided messages showing Vanessa hired him to remove rare bottles and the archive. He claimed not to know anything about the sedative. A second set of instructions had come from a number registered to a shell company tied to Shaw. Keller's attorney was negotiating an interview.
“What did the tapes say?” I asked.
“Some of the recordings are damaged. We recovered part of an argument between Anthony Moretti and Sloane. We're trying to establish the date and whether the voices are authentic.”
She played a short, professionally cleaned extract, explaining that it wasn't yet a verified transcript.
A man's voice, weary but firm: “You don't get my company by frightening my son.”
Another voice: “Then sign it before something worse happens.”
A scraping chair. A door. Silence.
Luca had gone perfectly still. “That's my father's voice.”
Alvarez stopped the playback. “We'll have a forensic examiner compare it against confirmed recordings.”
“I know his voice.”
“I understand. Your memory matters. Verification matters too.”
He looked down, then nodded.
I watched the exchange with a strange ache. Luca had spent nine years mourning a father he believed died in a business accident. Now he might have to understand that death as the final act of a long campaign of intimidation.
When the meeting ended, Luca asked whether I wanted lunch. He suggested a diner near the station, with people all around us and no private security table. Dad had a medical appointment, and I was tired of eating soup alone. So I agreed.
The diner smelled like onions and fresh coffee. We sat beneath a window where passing buses sprayed the curb with rainwater left from the morning. Luca ordered grilled cheese. I ordered pancakes because nothing in the past week had felt ordinary enough.
“Why did you keep my father on staff?” I asked him.
He blinked. “I don't employ your father.”
“Not him. Me. After I spilled coffee on your accountant at my interview.”
A slight smile. “You apologized and cleaned it up without blaming anyone. Then you told the manager the kitchen door didn't close properly and would hurt somebody. I needed someone willing to say when something was wrong.”
“Funny. I spent the next eleven months afraid to do exactly that.”
His expression faded. “I should have known what Vanessa was doing to the staff.”
“You can't see every hallway.”
“No. But I can choose who has power in them.”
I considered that. “Then make sure people can complain without losing their jobs. Not just because something happened to me.”
“I've asked an outside firm to review staff complaints and policies,” he said. “They report to my attorney, not to the household manager.”
“Good.”
He watched me spread jam across a pancake. “You don't sound impressed.”
“It's what should have been there already.”
After a long moment, he said, “You're right.”
I didn't expect those words from a man everyone called a boss.
When we left the diner, Luca stopped beside a newspaper box. A headline described police interest in old shipping contracts. The article did not name me, but my nerves tightened at the sight. I was still calculating how to move down a street without being recognized when a woman with a green scarf approached.
“Emma Reed?”
She was in her forties, with careful makeup and an oversized handbag. She looked more tired than threatening.
“Yes?”
“My name is Clara Shaw.” She glanced toward Luca. “My husband isn't the man you think he is.”
Luca's posture changed. “Your husband is Vincent Shaw?”
“On paper. Before that he called himself Victor.”
She opened her handbag and removed a folded grocery receipt. On the back she'd written an address.
“He told me if anything ever happened, I should go to Lakepoint Storage. Unit 204. I went this morning. It was empty. Someone had already cleared it.”
“Why are you telling us?” I asked.
“Because I have a daughter. And because last night someone stood outside her school and photographed her.”
I saw the same fear in Clara's face that I'd felt when I received the photo of Dad's broken door.
Luca kept his hands visible. “Have you spoken to the police?”
“Not yet. I didn't know who to trust.”
“Detective Alvarez is investigating. We can call her here, now.”
Clara's gaze darted toward the street. “Your fiancée told Victor she wanted out. He said she knew too much. Then he said something about Anthony's real ledger.”
Luca frowned. “What ledger?”
“Not the one in the crate. Another one. A little red book. He says Anthony hid it somewhere nobody would look.”
A bus roared past us. Clara flinched at the noise.
“He told Vanessa there was one person who could find it,” she continued. “Not you, Mr. Moretti. The daughter of the reporter.”
I felt the blood leave my face. “Me?”
Clara nodded. “He called you the girl with the blue envelope.”
The words struck me with the force of a remembered childhood scene. My father, sitting at our kitchen table, sealing an envelope while I watched. Blue stationery. A red stamp. He'd asked me to hide it in the safest place I knew until he came home from work.
I hadn't thought about that envelope for more than a decade.
“Emma?” Luca said softly.
I looked at him. “I know what he's talking about.”
“And where is it?”
I closed my eyes. I could almost smell the dust of my old bedroom, feel the grain of the wooden floor beneath my knees. I had slipped the envelope into the hollow base of a music box my mother gave me.
The music box had gone missing during the burglary after Anthony's death.
“No,” I whispered. “It was stolen.”
Clara gripped her bag. “Victor said it never left your family.”
Then a black sedan slowed across the street. The rear passenger window lowered just far enough for a phone camera to appear. Clara backed away.
“I told you too much,” she whispered.
Luca called Alvarez as the car accelerated. I memorized the last four digits of its plate and repeated them aloud. It was the most useful thing I could do.
May you like
But my attention stayed on Clara's final words. The music box had been stolen, yes. What Victor didn't know was that on the night of the burglary, I'd hidden the blue envelope somewhere else.
Somewhere I had never told my father.
