Chapter 10 - The Girl Who RememberedI had spent my life believing fear was a weakness that could be beaten out of a man.
That night taught me otherwise.
Fear was the hand tightening around your heart when someone took a child who had trusted you to keep her safe.
Fear was the silence on a telephone when every unanswered call became another possibility you couldn't bear to imagine.
And fear was the voice of my mother whispering that she had lost another person she loved because she had failed to protect the first.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” I demanded.
My mother was crying.
“I heard a car outside the convent. By the time I reached the garden, Samuel was unconscious, Elena was gone, and Ellie had disappeared.”
“Where are you?”
“In the chapel. I hid when they came back.”
“Stay there.”
“I can't leave them again, Lorenzo.”
“You're not leaving. You're staying alive.”
I ended the call and turned to Nico.
“Call every captain who still answers to me. I want road cameras, port records, private security logs, everything. Nobody touches Dominic until we find Ellie.”
“And if your uncle is involved?”
“Then I'll deal with him after I get the girl back.”
Within twenty minutes, we had a location.
The message had been routed through an abandoned security office near the Delaware River. The building belonged to one of Dominic's shell companies, though the registered owner had died eleven years earlier.
We arrived with six men and two unmarked vehicles.
The building was empty.
A desk stood in the middle of the main room. On it lay a single brass alarm clock, stopped at 4:19.
Beside it was a folded piece of paper.
ONE MAN. NO POLICE. BRING THE WATCH.
Nico read the message and shook his head.
“It's a trap.”
“Of course it is.”
“You can't go alone.”
“I won't.”
He gave me a hard look.
“Lorenzo.”
“I said I won't go alone. I said nothing about taking men who can be seen.”
I slipped my pistol into a concealed holster and examined the room.
Dust covered the floor, except for a narrow strip leading toward a rear door. On the wall was a photograph of my father, standing beside a young woman I didn't recognize.
The woman wore a watchmaker's apron.
Her face had been scratched out.
I turned the photograph over.
On the back, someone had written:
THE DAUGHTER FINISHED WHAT THE FATHER STARTED.
Elena.
My father's sister.
No.
Samuel's daughter had been a watchmaker too. She had worked on the pocket watch after Antonio's death, and someone had burned her workshop five years earlier.
Why?
Because she had discovered that the watch contained evidence.
I searched the desk and found a small envelope beneath the alarm clock. Inside was a photograph of Ellie beside her mother, taken shortly before Elena's death.
On the back, the child's handwriting spelled out a sentence.
MAMA SAID THE ROOM IS BEHIND THE CLOCK.
I stared at it.
Ellie had known about the hidden room at the old mansion. Her mother had told her about it, perhaps without understanding how important it was.
Dominic hadn't kidnapped her merely to obtain the watch.
He needed her to open something he could not open himself.
A seven-year-old girl was the last living person who knew how to reach the evidence her mother had hidden.
I called Daniel Mercer.
“We have a kidnapping and a suspect connected to an eighteen-year-old murder. I need you to prepare a team.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the waterfront club in the ledger.”
“That's dangerous territory.”
“I know.”
“Lorenzo, I need you to understand something. If Dominic is who I think he is, he has spent decades building a network that won't disappear because we arrest one man.”
“Then we arrest more than one.”
I ended the call and walked toward the exit.
Nico followed.
“What's your plan?”
“To give Dominic what he thinks he wants.”
“The watch?”
“The watch, the film, and me.”
Nico stopped walking.
“You're insane.”
“Possibly.”
“He'll kill you.”
“Not before he finds out what my father hid.”
I turned toward him.
“Dominic believes evidence makes people powerful. He thinks whoever possesses the secret controls the story. My father understood something else.”
“What?”
“The truth only matters when it leaves the room where it was hidden.”
I handed Nico a copy of the ledger.
“Get this to Mercer. Send the photographs to three independent journalists and the district attorney. If I don't contact you by midnight, release everything.”
Nico studied my face.
“And if you do contact me?”
“Release everything anyway.”
For the first time, he smiled.
“Your father would have hated that plan.”
“My father would have called it reckless.”
“He would have called it both.”
We reached the cars.
Before climbing inside, I received another message.
This one contained no photograph.
Only a voice recording.
I pressed play.
Ellie's voice came through the speaker, frightened but steady.
“Mr. Duca, don't give him the watch.”
A man's voice interrupted her.
“Enough.”
Then Ellie spoke again, louder this time.
“Because he already has the other one!”
The recording ended.
I froze.
The other one?
I pulled my father's pocket watch from my coat.
Then I remembered the small silver watch Elena had given me at the convent.
The watch my aunt had supposedly made when she was seventeen.
The watch that had revealed the key and the room number.
Dominic had been searching for one watch for eighteen years.
May you like
But my father had left behind two.
And the second one was now missing.
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