Chapter 11 - The Man Beside Luca
I watched Daniel through the hospital window until he turned his head and looked directly at me.
He couldn't have heard Miriam Vale's accusation. I was four floors above him, behind glass, with my brother's disconnected call still glowing on my phone. Yet his stillness made me feel exposed. He had stood beside Luca at the engagement dinner. He had obeyed Vanessa's order to restrain Mrs. Carter. He had driven us to the hospital and escorted Noah to safety. I had trusted him because Luca trusted him.
Now a stranger had told me my father's death was connected to the man standing beside Luca Moretti.
I stepped away from the window and called Detective Ortiz. She answered on the third ring. I told her exactly what Miriam had said, without adding my suspicions. Ortiz asked where Noah was. I said I didn't know. My brother's phone went straight to voicemail.
"Don't confront anyone," she said. "Stay inside the hospital. I'm sending officers to the hotel."
"What about Daniel?"
"Especially Daniel. We don't know whether that woman was telling the truth."
I found Luca outside Eleanor's room. His mother was sleeping, and he had a paper cup of coffee untouched in his hand. One look at my face and he put it down.
"Noah?"
"Someone approached him. She called herself Miriam Vale."
He frowned. "Grace's mother?"
"Grace told us her mother died. Miriam says Dad was murdered. She says I should ask Daniel who ordered it."
Luca didn't respond immediately. I watched him do something I had never seen him do before: examine a belief he had built his life around. Daniel had worked for his family for sixteen years. He knew which doors Luca left unlocked and which memories he refused to discuss.
"I won't warn him," Luca said at last. "Ortiz can investigate without us interfering."
"Can you really do that?"
"I have to."
He called the hospital's security supervisor and requested that our visitors be screened. He did not call Daniel. Then he sat beside me on the hard waiting-room bench. He looked less like Chicago's feared Mafia boss than a man learning how little power money could buy when the people he loved were in danger.
Forty minutes later, Ortiz arrived. Her officers had located Noah in the hotel lobby, frightened but unharmed. He had refused to follow Miriam upstairs. Instead, he had watched her leave through the revolving doors, then discovered his phone had been taken from his jacket during the encounter. He borrowed the desk clerk's phone to call us.
"She knew our father's middle name," Noah said when Ortiz put him on speaker. "She knew he used to take me fishing on Lake Michigan. I thought she might actually know something."
"You did the right thing staying in the lobby," I told him. My voice shook anyway.
Ortiz asked Noah to describe Miriam. He remembered a dark coat, a gray scarf, and a thin scar crossing one eyebrow. She had carried a leather portfolio but showed him no documents.
Then Ortiz showed us a photograph on her tablet. A woman in her late sixties stood beside Richard Vale at a charity event ten years earlier.
"That's her," Noah said.
Ortiz lowered the screen. "Miriam Vale is Richard's sister. Grace's mother was named Helen. Miriam is her aunt."
I felt sick. The lie had been deliberate, calculated to make us dismiss Grace's account and suspect Daniel. But a lie about identity didn't necessarily make everything else false.
"What if she knows about Dad?" I asked.
"Then we find out through evidence," Ortiz answered.
Luca's phone buzzed. A message from Daniel appeared: Is everything okay? I saw police outside the hospital.
Luca showed it to Ortiz. She asked him not to reply yet.
"We're checking old construction-site records," she said. "Your father's death was classified as an accident. We need to know who was present and who approved the safety inspection."
"Thomas Bennett worked for a subcontractor," I said. "He was supposed to be repairing an elevator mechanism."
"And Daniel?" Luca asked.
Ortiz hesitated. "He was assigned to the Moretti family's security detail that year. We haven't established whether he was anywhere near the site."
That evening I went into Eleanor's room. She was awake, staring at the ceiling. When I told her someone had tried to reach Noah, she took my hand.
"Salvatore used to make people suspicious of one another," she said. "He didn't need everyone to believe his lies. Only enough people to stop speaking."
"How did you survive him?"
She looked toward the window. "By remembering the difference between what he said and what I knew."
I thought about Daniel, about the restraint marks on Mrs. Carter's wrists, about the fact that he had followed Vanessa's instructions without checking with Luca. He had failed someone vulnerable. That mattered, even if he had never harmed my father.
Later, Ortiz returned with a document from the construction company's archived insurance file. The inspection report bore a signature on the last page. I recognized the name immediately.
Daniel Mercer.
My stomach dropped.
"He signed this?"
"It appears so," Ortiz said. "But we still have to authenticate it."
Luca stared at the page. "He never told me he worked at that site."
There was a second signature below Daniel's, marked as the approving executive for the subcontractor.
Richard Vale.
For years, I had imagined my father's last morning as a terrible accident, a loose bolt, a broken cable, one ordinary day that went wrong. Now his death had a paper trail leading directly toward the people who had watched our family grieve.
My phone rang from an unknown number. Ortiz nodded for me to answer on speaker.
A woman's voice said, "Tell Luca to stop looking at the signatures. Look at the date."
I glanced down. The report had been approved three days after my father died.
Before I could speak, the caller added, "And ask Daniel why the original inspection photographs disappeared."
May you like
The line went dead.
I looked at Luca. He looked back at me, and I understood that neither of us would sleep until we knew what Daniel had really done.
