Chapter 11
He sat down behind the desk.
“Tell me about your father.”
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“Giovani Romano.”
Alessia went still.
“You investigated me.”
“I investigate everyone in this house.”
“My father died nine years ago.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because he worked for Moretti Construction.”
Her face changed. Dante saw it.
“You knew,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t include it on your employment application.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed the job.”
“That isn’t the whole answer.”
Alessia looked toward the window. Outside, the lawn ran down toward the trees, and beyond the trees the road, and beyond the road the city she had grown up in.
“My father hated your family,” she said.
Dante leaned back. “That narrows nothing down.”
Despite herself, Alessia smiled. Then it vanished.
“He was an accountant for one of your father’s companies.”
“Yes.”
“He left six months before he died.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Dante watched her. “You’re lying again.”
Alessia’s eyes flashed. “Stop saying that.”
“Stop doing it.”
She turned away.
Dante waited.
“My father came home one night terrified,” she said finally. “He burned documents in our kitchen sink. He told my mother we were leaving Chicago.”
“When?”
“Eleven years ago.”
The same year Bianca Moretti died.
Dante’s expression hardened. “What happened?”
“We didn’t leave. Two days later he changed his mind. He never explained why.” She looked at him. “Two years after that, he died. Car accident on the Ryan.”
Dante was quiet.
“Did he know Lorenzo Bellini?”
Alessia looked at him.
“I don’t know,” she said.
And that time, he believed her.
The door opened without a knock. Matteo came in, and he was carrying a tablet, and his face was the face of a man who had found something he wished he hadn’t.
He set it on the desk.
“Security footage from last night,” he said. “You need to see this.”
CHAPTER 4 — ELEVEN MINUTES
The footage was grainy and gray, the color of a photograph left too long in the sun.
Matteo played it at normal speed. The corridor outside Dante’s study, the west hallway, empty. A grandfather clock at the far end, its pendulum a pale sliver. At 11:31, the corridor went dark. Not black — dark, the way a hallway goes when a man puts his palm over the lens of a camera and holds it there.
“It stays dark for seven minutes,” Matteo said. “Then it comes back.”