Chapter 3
That unsettled me immediately.
“Why would my wife give her driver an emergency plan I didn’t know about?”
Mateo didn’t answer.
He opened her messages.
At the top was a thread saved under a single initial.
E.
The final message had been sent at 9:07 that evening.
Less than forty minutes before the crash.
I’m on my way. Don’t tell Dominic yet. I need to see everything first.
My stomach tightened.
“Who is E?”
“We don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“We’re trying.”
I took the phone from him.
There were dozens of messages in the thread.
Most were ordinary enough to seem meaningless.
Thursday works.
I found the old statements.
Are you sure this is connected?
Please don’t contact him until I understand what happened.
Then one from three days earlier caught my attention.
If the dates are correct, Dominic never knew.
I read it twice.
“What dates?”
Mateo shook his head.
I scrolled.
There were photographs.
Old bank statements.
Property records.
A scanned letter bearing my father’s name.
And then a photograph of a small redbrick house I had never seen before.
The address beneath it was on West 79th Street.
The South Side.
Exactly where Clara had been headed.
I enlarged the photo.
The house looked ordinary. Narrow porch. Two upstairs windows. A maple tree bending over the front fence.
Nothing about it explained why my wife had been driving across Chicago late at night without telling me.
Nothing explained why she had told someone not to contact me.
“What was she doing there?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Who owns the house?”
“A woman named Evelyn Mercer.”
I looked up.
The name meant nothing to me.
“Age?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Connection to Moretti?”
“None that we can find.”
That surprised me.
“What about the SUV?”
Mateo’s expression changed slightly.
“We need to be careful with that assumption.”
“What assumption?”
“That Moretti ordered something.”
My jaw hardened.
“You said the crash happened in his territory.”
“I said it happened on the South Side. That’s not the same thing.”
“You also said an armored SUV hit them.”
“Large SUV,” he corrected. “Dark color. Initial witness statement called it armored, but the traffic camera footage isn’t clear.”
“So now you’re telling me it might have been random?”
“I’m telling you we don’t know.”
I hated those words.
I had built my entire life around making sure I knew.
Who owed me.
Who trusted me.