Chapter 14
“My father’s old apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered something.”
“What?”
“When my father burned those papers,” Alessia said, “he kept one envelope.”
Dante was already moving.
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.