“He’s in the living room.”
“Don’t mention my real name. Kids have good memories.”
“He’ll remember your voice.” Lucy had already told him about finding Kevin sitting on the stairs after his first visit.
“Just say I’m your husband’s great uncle, passing through.”
“What’s your name?”
“How about Nathan?”
“I doubt you’ll fool him.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
She led Dominic to the front of the house. Having learned from his example, she’d already closed the blinds and curtains on every window.
Kevin was nestled on the couch in his pajamas, watching a cartoon on his LeapPad.
“Kevin, this is your dad’s uncle Nathan. He was passing through and came for a visit.”
Dominic held out a hand. “Hello, young man.”
Kevin stared up at him. He didn’t move. Instead, he said something that brought Lucy’s hand to her mouth.
“You’re not our uncle.” The boy returned his attention to the flickering screen perched on his lap.
“How do you know that, Kevin?” Lucy asked.
“I seen that man before, and you didn’t tell me he’s our uncle. You woulda told me.”
Dominic now looked thoroughly intrigued. He dropped onto the chair he had occupied on his first visit. Lucy sat beside her son.
Kevin muted his cartoon and looked Lanza straight in the eye. “Are you a bad man?”
Lanza didn’t miss a beat. “Sometimes I am, Kevin. But not tonight.”
“Will you hurt my mom?”
“Never. Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know. Do you believe him, Mommy?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever try to hurt my dad?”
“No.”
Lanza said, “I never, ever hurt your dad.”
Kevin studied Lanza with cool regard. Lucy could see that the Mafioso was intrigued by the boy’s unexpected maturity.
Intrigued, yes, and perhaps a bit disturbed.
“It’s important that you believe me, Kevin. I didn’t hurt your dad.”
Kevin’s neck muscles tensed. His back straightened. Lucy knew the signs. She had seen Kevin transform enough times before. She thought she was ready for what was coming.
But she wasn’t.
The next words out of her son’s mouth sent a chill down her spine.
“I am aware of your occupation, Mr. Lanza. But I do believe you. Thank you.”
Lanza’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Lucy. She shook her head. She had never mentioned his name to Kevin.
Lanza made a decision. He slipped out of his chair and kneeled in front of the boy.
“Jack Hendricks. Do you remember the person who hurt you?”
Lucy held her breath. A second passed. Another. Then:
“I couldn’t see.”
“What do you remember?” Lanza asked gently. “Anything?”
“The smell.”
Lucy was astonished. Kevin had never talked about this. “What smell, honey?”
“Like … a hospital lady.”
While Lucy processed that puzzling revelation, Lanza held out his hands. “The gun, Kevin. What hand was it in?”
Kevin stared at him, as if in a trance.
Then he touched Lanza’s left hand.
A left-handed killer…? A nurse?
Lucy’s racing thoughts were instantly derailed when Kevin’s calm expression suddenly transformed to pure horror. He looked up at her, eyes bulging with fear, and cried, “Luce! I saw Jack!”
Lucy’s skin prickled. “But, Kevin, you were Jack!”
“I saw him! Jack! I wanted to live, but I couldn’t! I couldn’t live another day!” He screamed and then burst into tears.
Lucy held the sobbing boy tight to her breast as tears filled her own eyes and coursed down her face.
Lanza resumed his seat. He looked mystified … and deeply affected.
The thought flashed through Lucy’s mind that, in that moment, Dominic Lanza seemed more like a worried grandfather than a ruthless crime boss.
* * *
“We’ve been asking questions. Calling in favors. I want you to know what we found.”
It was after nine. Kevin was asleep upstairs. Dominic had waited patiently while she dried the boy’s tears, readied him for bed, and read him a story. He hadn’t questioned Lucy about what he’d seen and heard. He seemed to accept that, somehow, Kevin had inherited scattered, ragged memories from his father’s life. When Lucy had expressed her surprise at his equanimity, he had replied softly, “In my business, dear girl, you don’t survive unless you have a good nose for deception. You’re a very accomplished woman, but I can’t believe what I have just witnessed was staged for my benefit.”
They were back in their places in the living room, working their way through a bottle of Primitivo.
Lucy was sharing a drink with Dominic Lanza, notorious Mafia kingpin.
Her new friend.
She wondered what Detective Carla Scarlatti would think if she walked in right now.
“We have contacts in Boston. Back in ’06, they were running a protection racket on the waterfront up there. A couple of their associates got themselves arrested. The Boston cops had them on tape, making threats. The usual. Nothing big. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. But one of the guys didn’t follow tradition. He tried to make a deal.” Lanza took a swallow of wine. “You’ve seen the movies. You know where that can lead.”
Lucy nodded, marveling at her own composure as she listened to this.
“An order went out, but before anyone could act on it, he turned up dead in his cell. Someone had gotten to him first.”
“Who?”
“Someone from down here.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
“The guy had offered a sweetener. His lawyer told the prosecutor that if they let him off with a token misdemeanor charge, he’d not only sell out his waterfront bosses, he’d give them a high-end car theft ring in New Jersey. Seems that before he moved to Boston, he’d been part of a crew down here. They’d steal luxury cars and deliver them to a dead drop. Another crew would take them to a salvage yard, where the cars would be rolled into containers, and then shipped overseas as ‘used car parts.’ Sometimes they’d cut them in half—put half in one container and the other half in another one. They were sending them to places like West Africa and Eastern Europe where demand was high and no questions were asked. They had a few crooked cops running interference for the street crews, and giving cover for the trucks that delivered the containers to the docks. The thing is, we control the unions in the Port of Newark, and we never got wind of this. I’m guessing they had a customs agent on the payroll. There’s always a Maersk captain around who will look the other way if a few extra containers get loaded. For a price, of course.”
“You said luxury cars…” Lucy could see where this was going.
Dominic nodded. “It ties in with your husband’s spreadsheet. The evidence the guy gave to the Boston prosecutor mentioned a salvage yard in East Orange. He said he’d never been there, but some of the pickup crews had talked about it. By the time the Boston cops got the Feds involved and put a case together for a search warrant, the scrap yard had closed down and the manager—some guy named Parnell—had disappeared.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Our Boston friends have friends.”
“Meaning, friends in the police?”
“And … other places.” He drained his glass, topped up hers, and refilled his own. “Parnell ran the operation, but he wasn’t the boss. The cops discovered that the East Orange property was owned by a New York company. When they checked, they learned that that company was owned by a Delaware company, and that company was owned by a Texas company, and so on. They never did figure out who was behind it.” He smiled. “We didn’t either, but we got further than them.”
“Tell me.”
“There were eight shell companies registered in seven different jurisdictions, but the trail ended in Delaware. Most people don’t know that the most secretive place in the world isn’t one of those offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands or Luxembourg. It’s Delaware … right here in the self-righteous, holier-than-thou U. S. of A.” Dominic produced a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Lucy.
It was a copy of the last page of Jack’s spreadsheet.
“Look at that string of words across the bottom.”
Orcone, Dorilla, Oronte, Doraspe, Policare, Meroe, Tomiri, Tigrane …
Lucy remembered them. They had puzzled her from the beginning.
“They’re the names of characters in an Italian opera,” Dominic said.
Lucy stared at him, confusion written across her face.
“The opera is called Tigrane. It was written back in the seventeen hundreds. But what’s important about those words is that they’re the names of shell companies: Orcone Ltd. is the New York company that owned the East Orange property. Dorilla Inc. is the Delaware company that owned Orcone. Oronte is the company that owned Dorilla, and so on, right down the list. Tigrane Holdings Ltd. was the company in Delaware where the trail ended. Somehow, Jack got his hands on that list. Maybe he researched it. Maybe he figured out who owned that last company.” He spoke gently. “Or, maybe he was killed trying.”
Lucy was stunned. “Dominic, I need to take this to Robert! Now he has grounds to start a proper investigation!”
“You would need to hide our involvement. You would need to explain how you obtained the information about the Boston investigation.” He was thoughtful. “There’s a certain private investigator who owes me a favor. I might be able to arrange something.”
“Thank you!”
“But I have one reservation.”
“What’s that?”
“It concerns your Mr. Olivetti. Perhaps it no longer involves him directly, but it needs to be looked at.”
He drank some wine.
He looked at her.
“Dominic, please don’t leave me hanging!”
“The composer of Tigrane was a man named Alessandro Scarlatti.”
It took a moment for the implication to sink in. Lucy leapt to her feet.
“THAT BITCH!”
“Stay calm, my girl. Think!”
Lucy started pacing. “Left-handed killer? Scarlatti opera characters? And now, ‘hospital lady’ smell? That woman has eczema on her hands! She uses an ointment that smells like a hospital! Too many coincidences, Dominic! I’m going after her!”
“Lucy, what did I just say?”
She whirled and faced him. Hot tears ran down her face. “I can’t wait on this! It’s been too many years! Too much pain!”
“What do you imagine you can do?” Dominic asked calmly.
“Confront her! Get her arrested! Get her ass thrown in jail!”
“Lucy…”
“What?”
“What is your evidence?”
Lucy stood immobile, nailed in place by the question, angry and confused. “The … the names of those companies. They’re completely unique! I bet that composer was some sort of ancestor!”
“We don’t know that.”
“Easily researched! There are all these genealogy websites. It shouldn’t take long.”
“Assume you’re right,” he said quietly. “Assume she’s a direct descendant of Alessandro Scarlatti and you can prove she has intimate knowledge of all his operas. What else have you got? What have you got that connects her to this guy Parnell? Or to the operation in East Orange? Or to a single stolen car?”
The questions confounded her.
Dominic pressed his point. “Didn’t this Scarlatti woman arrest you? Just a few days ago?”
“Yeah.”
“And weren’t you the one lecturing her about probable cause? Didn’t your Mr. Olivetti get an immediate court order to have you released?”
Lucy didn’t reply.
“Do I have your attention?”
“Yes.”
“You’re very angry.”
“Yes.”
“Anger is counterproductive. To be useful, it needs to be channeled. Essa deve diventare la tua forza.”
“It must become my strength.”
“Yes.”
“What are you thinking?”
“How determined are you?”
“Try me!”
“What skills do you have?”
“My husband trained me. You might be surprised.”
A second passed. Another …
“Surprise me.”
26
It was a classic late-season storm. It began as a tropical wave, sliding off the African continent on October 11. By the eighteenth, it had crossed the Atlantic, glided past the Windward Islands, and penetrated the Caribbean.
By October 21, it was beginning to show primitive signs of organization. Barometric pressures were falling, and circulation was becoming more well-defined. A day later, deep convection formed near the system’s center, creating a tropical depression. It moved slowly west, then southwest. But then an upper-level trough over the northwest Caribbean changed everything. Like a carnivorous animal, the beast turned, first north, then northeast. Within hours, it strengthened to become a tropical storm.
It accelerated, stalking its first prey.
It transitioned into a Category 1 hurricane just south of Kingston, Jamaica, and crossed that country’s eastern parishes on October 24. It re-emerged over the deep, warm waters of the Cayman Trench, leaving one person dead and thousands of damaged homes. It strengthened quickly—Category 2, Category 3—and then slammed into Santiago de Cuba with all the fury of a major hurricane. It spent five hours grinding a path across that storied island, leaving eleven dead and 17,000 homeless. It was one of the costliest hurricanes in Cuba’s history.
But Hurricane Sandy was far from done.
Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas … each was assaulted in its turn, leaving death and destruction in its wake.
By October 26, tracking northeast, passing Great Abaco in the Bahamas, it briefly dropped below hurricane strength.
But its span had vastly increased.
By the twenty-seventh, it had regained hurricane strength, now with a radius of maximum winds exceeding one hundred nautical miles.
On Sunday, October 28, the center of Hurricane Sandy—“Frankenstorm” as it would ever after be known—began curving north. Soon it was riding the warm, deadly waters of the Gulf Stream as it churned past North Carolina.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami warned that Sandy was expected to bring life-threatening storm surge flooding to the Mid-Atlantic coast, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor, with winds expected to be near hurricane force at landfall.
Bayonne’s mayor announced that a state of emergency would go into effect at six in the evening on Sunday.
But Lucinda Hendricks wasn’t paying attention.
* * *
Scarlatti.
Every corporate register associated with the car theft ring led back to that name.
The same theft ring Jack had been investigating.
The people who killed Cal Parrish.
The people who killed Jack.
Jack said he hadn’t seen his killer’s face.
Jack said the killer was left-handed.
JACK … said…?
Lucy wondered if she was going insane.
It was eleven at night and she was sitting in her car, a few doors north of Carla Scarlatti’s residence.
Waiting.
It hadn’t taken much effort to figure out where the woman lived. During Lucy’s big blowup telephone call with Robert, he’d let slip that she lived on Collard Street, in The Heights, across from the reservoir. The north end of Collard terminated next to Reservoir No. 2. There were fewer than a dozen houses on that final stretch of roadway. Last night, Lucy had called the
Jersey City Police’s main number, pretending to be a witness Scarlatti had been trying to contact, and asked what shift the detective was working. The receptionist told her she’d just started afternoons. So, after that call, Lucy had parked at the east end of Spruce Street and waited. Sure enough, just after eleven thirty, a black SUV had rolled past her and turned north onto Collard. Scarlatti was at the wheel.
Lucy had waited ten minutes and then driven slowly up Collard. It had taken her less than a minute to identify the woman’s house.
And it had only taken her ten more seconds to realize the significance of what she had spotted on the rear bumper of Scarlatti’s 2005 Ford Explorer.
Now, twenty-hours later, she was back.
She was back, and she was thinking.
She was thinking about how relentlessly this woman had tried to make Jack’s murder look like a Mob hit. About how sharply she had questioned Lucy after she innocently identified the trinacria symbol on the bracelet extracted from Jack’s throat. About how reliable she had been in ensuring that Lucy’s name kept showing up in leaked press reports. About how the woman seemed so determined to implicate Lucy in Neil Clooney’s murder.
She was thinking about how the woman carried her service weapon on her left hip.
About how she’d held her pen in her left hand during Lucy’s in-custody interview.
And … about the faded bumper sticker on Scarlatti’s Explorer.
A sticker that featured an image of Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland.
Sutherland had played Agent Jack Bauer in 24, a long-running TV series that Lucy’s Jack had always enjoyed.
She was thinking about that bumper sticker on Scarlatti’s Explorer because it bore a three-word legend:
Live Another Day
At eleven forty-five, Carla Scarlatti’s Ford pulled into the short drive in front of her house. She got out, tugged her jacket collar close against the gusting wind and drizzle, locked the vehicle, and strode to her door. She didn’t notice Lucy waiting only a few steps away, in the narrow, dark space between Scarlatti’s house and her neighbor’s.
As the door opened, Lucy made her move.
Scarlatti must have heard the scrape of Lucy’s foot. Her left hand went for her Glock. But by the time her fingers found the holster, the gun was gone and she was pitching headlong onto the tiled floor of her front hallway.
Storm Rising Page 18