Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN WHO KNEW THE SONG
The police arrived at Blackwood House just after nine. They did not use the word fortress. They walked through the limestone entrance with cameras clipped to their uniforms, nodded at the men who guarded the doors, and asked the questions people had been afraid to ask Alessandro for twenty years.
Who controlled the security system? Who had issued the temporary credentials? Who was the missing woman? Why had a room suitable for detention been concealed behind mechanical storage?
Alessandro answered each question. He did not instruct his lawyers to interfere. When Detective Mara Ellis asked whether he was aware that his property might have been used for kidnapping, he said, “I wasn't. I should have been.”
Ellis studied him for a moment. She was in her late forties, with cropped hair and the steady fatigue of someone who had seen powerful men discover morality immediately after becoming vulnerable. “That isn't an answer to who built it,” she said.
“No,” Alessandro admitted. “It isn't.”
Sophia gave a separate statement in a quiet room with a child services specialist present. She explained the borrowed watercolor set, the painting, the drawing and the shoulder marks. Emma was not interviewed that night. A specialist advised the adults against repeatedly asking leading questions and arranged a forensic interview for the following morning, if Sophia consented.
Sophia agreed only after being told she could sit nearby and stop the process if Emma became distressed. The little girl did not understand why people suddenly wanted to know about her drawings. She asked whether the yellow flower had survived. Sophia told her yes, although it had faded from Alessandro's cheek under the cold November air.
At midnight, Cole brought news. The man who had tried Sophia's door was named Leon Brice, a private security subcontractor registered through a company Vincent had engaged six weeks earlier. Brice had been seen entering an underground parking garage on East Seventy-Third Street. The vehicle he used belonged to a holding company connected to a medical transport service.
“A medical transport?” Alessandro asked.
“Ambulances, patient transfers, home care. That's what the business says it does.”
“Find the vehicles, not just the business.”
“The police are doing that.”
Alessandro looked at Cole. “You sound pleased.”
“I'd be more pleased if they found the woman alive.”
For the first time that night, Alessandro heard the rebuke beneath the sentence. He had built an organization that knew how to locate debtors, pressure competitors and move contraband through freight yards. It had not occurred to him until now that the same competence could be used to find a victim without threatening anyone. He had been proud of how efficiently his men followed orders. Their unquestioning obedience had made this possible.
“Tell me what you really think,” he said.
Cole hesitated. “Vincent didn't hide a locked room from you because he was a genius. He hid it because this house was trained not to ask questions. You trained us.”
Alessandro did not argue. The words stayed with him after Cole left.
At dawn, Detective Ellis received a call from an emergency department in Brooklyn. A woman had been admitted with dehydration, bruises and injuries consistent with prolonged confinement. A taxi driver had found her disoriented near the service entrance of a medical transport depot. She had refused to give her name but kept repeating one sentence: “Tell Moretti about his sister.”
Ellis went to the hospital. She returned with a name: Dr. Isabel Vega, a forensic pathologist who had once worked for the city medical examiner. Vega had disappeared nine days earlier after requesting archived samples from the investigation into the warehouse fire that killed Bianca Moretti.
Alessandro learned this from Ellis, not from his own network. The difference mattered. A physician had vanished while reopening his sister's case, and the information had never reached him. Someone had made certain of that.
“Can I speak to her?” he asked.
“When her doctors say she's ready, and only if she agrees. You can give us your questions.”
He wrote them down. Where did you hear Bianca's song? Why was the fire file reopened? What did Vincent want? Then he looked at the page and added another: Are you safe now?
The following morning, Sophia took Emma to a child advocacy center. The building smelled of crayons and clean carpet, and the interviewer, a woman named Tessa, wore a plain cardigan rather than a uniform. Sophia observed through a separate window with permission. Emma had a stuffed duck on her lap and a box of washable markers beside her. She was not told what answers anybody hoped for.
At first she talked about butterflies, pancakes and her grandmother's cat. Then Tessa asked an open question about the picture Emma had drawn at the house. Emma described the door with three black circles and the lady's fingers under it.
“The lady said she used to know a girl called Bee,” Emma said.
“Tell me about Bee.”
“She sang the thunder song. The lady said Bee was brave. Mister Cross got mad because I was listening.”
“Who is Mister Cross?”
“The old man with the shiny cross.”
Emma then drew an elevator, a cart and red shoes. Asked what the red shoes meant, she said, “A man with red shoes pushed the cart. He said the lady had to go before the butterfly man woke up.”
Sophia began to cry behind the glass. Her daughter had turned three less than six months earlier. She should have been learning colors, not remembering a frightened voice through a door. Tessa ended the interview when Emma grew tired, and Sophia thanked her for refusing to make a performance of the child.
Back at Blackwood House, Cole located old building plans from before the mansion was renovated. The room behind the red door had once been a coal chute access chamber. A second passage, since boarded over, led to a narrow utility shaft extending into an adjoining property. The neighboring building was now a private medical office. Its lease had been held by three different corporations in eight years, all managed by the same attorney: Peter Saye.
Saye had been Vincent's accountant for fifteen years.
Alessandro carried the plans to Detective Ellis. They agreed that officers would search the neighboring office pursuant to lawful authority rather than have Moretti men force their way inside. Alessandro wanted to act immediately. Ellis told him that evidence recovered improperly could make every future prosecution harder. He listened because the alternative was continuing to believe his impatience made him right.
By late afternoon, Ellis was authorized to search the medical office. Its records showed two ambulance transfers on the night Isabel Vega disappeared, both billed as routine trips. One destination was fictional. The second was an unused clinic in the Bronx. Police began checking it while Vincent remained missing.
Alessandro visited his mother's old room for the first time in months. Bianca's photograph stood on the mantel. His sister had been twenty-five when she died, a social worker who kept telling him the family's power should be used for more than intimidation. They had argued on their last evening together. She had accused him of confusing loyalty with silence. He had called her naive. The argument had ended with him walking out, certain there would be time to apologize.
He now wondered whether the reason she had died was linked to what she refused to keep silent.
His telephone rang. It was Ellis. Dr. Vega had agreed to answer some questions in a recorded interview, and she had asked for Alessandro to hear one part of it. She had identified the man who imprisoned her. It was Vincent. But the reason she had reopened Bianca's case was more startling.
“Dr. Vega found evidence your sister didn't die in the warehouse where her remains were recovered,” Ellis said.
Alessandro sat down slowly. “What does that mean?”
“It means someone may have moved her there after she died. We don't yet know who or why.”
He stared at the floor, imagining Bianca in the last moments of her life, somewhere other than the burning warehouse that had haunted him for twelve years. He had visited the site every anniversary. He had stood in the rain beside a plaque bearing her name. Had he been mourning the wrong place?
“Is there more?” he asked.
“Yes. Dr. Vega says she heard a recording of Bianca speaking the night before her death. In it, Bianca names the person she feared most.”
“Vincent?”
“No,” Ellis said. “You.”
Alessandro replayed the sentence in his mind, searching for a way it could be harmless. Bianca had been afraid of his anger, perhaps, or of what he might do to the family when he inherited. He could remember a hundred arguments, each one small enough to dismiss at the time, and he could remember how she sometimes fell silent when he entered a room.
“What exactly did she say?” he asked.
“I won't quote a recording I haven't personally authenticated,” Ellis replied. “Dr. Vega heard only an excerpt. Someone may have edited it. I called because I thought you deserved to know the allegation before the men working for Vincent used it against you.”
“Thank you,” he said. The words were difficult but sincere.
After the call, he removed the framed photograph of Bianca from its silver stand. Behind it, the photographer had written the date and a note in his sister's hand: Next year, please remember to smile. He had spent twelve years failing at that request.
Across town, Sophia waited with Emma in the advocacy center's courtyard. The little girl was feeding imaginary crumbs to stone birds. Sophia watched her carefully, determined not to make every ordinary gesture a possible clue. Her phone rang with a number she did not recognize.
A woman whispered, “Tell Moretti the recording is a trap. Bianca wasn't afraid of her brother. She was afraid of what someone could make him believe.”
“Who is this?” Sophia asked.
May you like
The line disconnected. A second later, a photograph arrived by text: Bianca Moretti standing beside Vincent Romano outside a closed warehouse, holding a small recorder in her hand. On the back of the photograph, someone had written one word.
Original.
