Red, White and Dead Part 34

My father shook his head and held his hand up. "Isabel," he said with determination. In fact, he sounded very much like a father who had heard enough, and was about to set the record straight. "Isabel," he said again. "Of course I have watched over my little girl and my little boy and my wife." He cleared his throat. "My former wife. But I was never intrusive. I never followed you in the way you are talking about. Of course, I heard about Sam disappearing and your client dying, and then a few months later I heard about your friend dying and you being suspected of her murder. So, of course, I was around more at those times. That's why I was still around when I saw you meet with Dez Romano. But I never tailed you so you felt watched, never so you felt me there. I had to make sure you were okay. Certainly you can understand that. I had to ensure that you were protected. I just could not believe when I saw who you were hanging out with."

"Hanging out with? What does that mean?"

"Michael DeSanto."

"I wasn't hanging out with Michael DeSanto."

He held up his hand again. "I realize that. I figured out that you were doing undercover work with John Mayburn. What I couldn't figure out was if it was some kind of trap. I knew that DeSanto was working with Dez Romano. I knew Romano was in the new version of the Camorra in the United States. The thing is, Romano and these U.S. guys in the System work differently. I had no idea what was going on. It took me a while to determine that it was just a coincidence-an entirely freakish coincidence-that you were involved with them."

I stopped and thought about it. "That must have been bizarre."

He shook his head. "You have no idea."

We both chuckled, but then I stopped short.

"What?" he said.

"That's the first time I've seen your smile in twenty-two years."

That made him lose his smile. Both of us fell silent for a moment.

"I never intended to step out of the shadows, Izzy. But then that night when Romano and DeSanto were running after you..." He shook his head, as if trying to shake off a horrid memory. "I had to save you."

"Well...thank you."

He nodded.

After a minute of uncomfortable quiet, we began talking again. And we talked for an hour. It was a quiet conversation filled with short questions designed to find the most minimal amount of information without prying too much. We were like new parents dancing around a baby, not wanting to wake it up, afraid of what might happen if we did.

"Where did you live the whole time?" I asked him.

"Rome," he told me. "Mostly Rome, but also Milan and Naples."

"What did you do with yourself?"

"I joined the antimafia office. I practiced my Italian. And I went back into profiling."

"Trying to bring down the Camorra."

A solemn nod.

"You just couldn't leave it behind."

His face turned fast to mine, his eyes flashing, then he looked back at the seat in front of him. "I knew nothing else."

"So when I went to the antimafia office in Rome, did they let you know?"

"Not right away, but yes. Hardly anyone knows that I work with the office. Almost no one knows my real name or ident.i.ty. But word of your visit eventually got to some people I know. And they briefed me."

"And then I was followed to Naples, and those guys came after me with guns." Something occurred to me. "Elena said that those men were just trying to scare me, because the Camorra doesn't chase, they kill."

"That's true."

I felt a little frozen with fear. "Did you send those guys after me? Were you trying to scare me into going home or something?"

"No." His voice was curt, distinct. "Of course not. I never want you to be scared. From what I can tell, there must be a Camorra spy in the Rome antimafia office, a mole who told someone you were in there. They must have figured out you were going to Naples and followed you."

I replayed that night when the guys were chasing me, when they were getting off the elevator near ours in the hotel and ran down the hall toward our room, only to get clocked with that door.

"That was you, wasn't it?" I said. "The door opening when those guys were running down the hallway at the hotel?"

"Yes."

"Very Laurel and Hardy of you."

He chuckled again. "Sometimes you have to go back to the basics."

I folded my hands in my lap and looked down at them. "Did you ever remarry?"

A sad smile, a definitive yet soft, "No."

"Do you have any other kids?"

A shake of his head, a flash of pain across his face, as if the thought seared him.

He seemed so strong, someone who could endure anything, even the forced loss of his family, and yet, now that the secret was out, there was something that arose from within him and was revealed in his eyes. It was...What was it? He was wounded. Yes, my father was a wounded man.

How strange to think of him alive, as someone suffering right now, instead of thinking of him as my father, who pa.s.sed away when I was young.

"And you," he said. "I know a little more about you. And I have to say, from what I saw, I liked that Sam."

That Sam...I felt a wave of sadness. It was so powerful I closed my eyes against it. But then I realized it was just that-only a wave, one that crested and went away. When it was gone, I opened my eyes and looked into my father's-green eyes that looked like mine (minus my eyeliner and two coats of mascara).

Thinking of Sam and me, of the couple we used to be, made me think of another couple, and I had to ask. "Does Mom know?"

"That I'm alive?"

"Yes."

He shook his head no.

The internal wounds seemed to pain him now, and his eyes took on an anguished tint.

"I guess we need to figure out how to handle this," I said.

He nodded. "Yes, there's a lot to think about."

I said, "Who did you tell?"

He looked at me questioningly.

"I mean who did you tell that you faked your death? Anyone?"

"Elena."

"But no one else?"

"Of course not. That's part of the deal."

"No one. Wow. That can't be good for you."

He shot me a question with his eyes.

"You know," I said, "you must be really f.u.c.ked up."

He laughed. I laughed. Then we started to laugh harder. It wasn't particularly humorous, but somehow a funny bone had been struck, one in both me and my dad. My dad. That was the first time I had thought of him like that since I learned he was alive.

61.

D ez Romano looked at his date next to him at the bar at Fulton Lounge. She was a medical student at the University of Chicago, having returned to school after a successful career at a pharmaceutical company, and she was f.u.c.king hot.

Dez thought back to when he was growing up and how he'd believed women were either gorgeous or they were brilliant. Never both. Or at least that's what his father always told him. Thank G.o.d he eventually realized that wasn't the case. And in a way, today's breed of women, like this one, had shown him the path and made Dez want to be at a different level himself.

When Dez married his ex-wife, they were both from the South Side of Chicago. He envisioned that his marriage would be like that of his parents'-his father ran the roost, his mother did whatever his father told her to. Dez thought he wanted that kind of relationship. Dez's wife, however, ran circles around him. She got a college degree when he didn't. She went on to get her MBA. During all that time, all that education, he was the one who had the pocket change.

He was just starting to work with the Camorra and learn the business. There wasn't much money to go around, there certainly wasn't any glamour, but he was the one, not his ex, who was making whatever money they had, he funded her financial loans. After finishing MBA school, his ex skyrocketed. She worked for one big corporation after another, eventually moving up to a CFO position at a Fortune 500 company. She had an affair with another executive and left Dez. She didn't even marry that executive. It occurred to Dez years later that she might have had the affair just for an excuse to walk out. After they were done, she just moved up and up and up, and now she was one of the top execs at her company, set to take it over in the next few years.

Dez was glad for the divorce. It had kicked him in the a.s.s, made him step up his work with the Camorra. He wasn't able to seek success the way his ex had. He wasn't going to get an education and climb his way up the ranks. But as he started dating this new breed of women, who were so feminine, so s.e.xy, and so in charge of their intellect and their lives, he decided he wanted to be like that, too.

"So," the med student said, swiveling on her stool and facing him, "what should we do after this?" She had a guy's name, Chad or something, and she was from a little town in Tennessee. But she owned this town now, or she was about to, like so many other women like her. She had been telling him how the pharmaceutical company was paying for med school, how she would eventually go back to work for them. "Nightcap?" she said, c.o.c.king her head to her shoulder.

"Great." Dez left the topic of s.e.x alone, although he knew she wanted him to bring it up, to make a flirty, seductive overture of some sort so it was clear exactly what they were about to do. But no, Dez liked making these women work, and then let them think he was taking a backseat, that they were subtly in charge of it all.

He had to admit, he thought he'd played that route with Izzy McNeil, thought that he'd played her to talk to him, to hang out with him. The truth was he'd seen her glancing at him the moment he walked into Gibsons. Of course, he realized now that he was the one who'd been played. Of course she had glanced. Of course she had spoken up. She had been sitting there specifically waiting for him to come into the restaurant.

He hadn't been able to figure out what McNeil wanted at first. When they were at the nature museum, she'd tossed out the comment about working for the Feds, but he didn't believe that, not unless the Feds were doing things really, really differently. Instead, he figured she worked for the bank, the one that had brought Michael down. And now he knew she was probably working for her father, working to bring down the Camorra.

But ultimately it didn't matter who she worked for. Soon, she wouldn't be working for anyone ever again.

The med student leaned forward a little and sipped her wine. She flashed him a gorgeous smile. She had long, shiny brown hair that hung flat next to her head. She looked at her watch. "I have rounds tomorrow with the gastro service at five o'clock."

"I have to be up early myself. But we still have time for our nightcap."

He downed the last bit of red wine in the gla.s.s in front of him, then he made like he was going to signal the bartender for another round.

She caught his arm and smiled. "Let's get out of here."

He thought of what he really had to do tomorrow. He had to wait for Izzy McNeil and her father to come back to the United States, had to wait for Mommy McNeil to show up. And once he had the McNeil family together, he would kill them.

Dez had arranged something ingenious, if he did say so himself. He had gotten the place rigged so that on his command, a natural gas leak would seep into the building. His boss, La Duca, appreciated the beauty of the irony and had told Dez that a well-placed gas leak was what had led to the death of Grandma McNeil down in Arizona. Eventually, a buildup of gas in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Mexicans' building would ignite the flame of a commercial water heater and the building would go up, and the McNeils would fry, just the way Grandma had, just the way they thought Christopher McNeil orginally had.

The cops would suspect that the Mexicans had set their own building aflame. They would have good reasons to think that. Dez had been slipping information to the authorities, through one of his other dealers, about the Mexicans. Their group was getting arrested one by one. The walls were closing in. And the motive for the four bodies discovered there, four bodies that the Mexicans sent up in flames along with their building, would be clear. Charlie McNeil had gotten into trouble with drugs. Trouble he couldn't pay for or dig himself out of, and so to send a message, the Mexicans had lured his family in and taken them all out. They were ruthless, those Mexicans. The cops wouldn't come looking for anyone else.

There was one thing Dez had to do before he killed the McNeils. And this part La Duca didn't know about. He would get Christopher McNeil to talk before he died, get him to tell Dez the ident.i.ty of the top boss, the one in Naples. McNeil must know who that boss was, having studied the Camorra and worked against them in secrecy for as long as he had. Once Dez knew the ident.i.ty of the boss, he wouldn't be relying solely on information trickling down through La Duca. He wouldn't be operating so much in the dark. Instead, he would know his audience, and he could create his other plans-the ones for the rest of his life, the Camorra, the city of Chicago. He intended to play the city the way it used to be played-with personal agendas served, but always giving back to the community at large. Letting the cops bust the Mexicans certainly had that theme in mind.

And then, yes. He was going to bring the Camorra, the new version of the Camorra, to the world.

The med student stood and tucked her black alligator purse under her arm, jerking her head at the door with a smile.

s.e.x, Dez decided, would take the edge off and kill some time. He stood, giving her the same smile back.

He trailed her to the door, looking at her a.s.s. Too bad Izzy McNeil hadn't turned out to be Easy McNeil, like this chick. The interesting thing about these women was that most of them had finally realized that it didn't lessen their power to have s.e.x with a guy. Totally the opposite. It empowered them. It was just that some of them waited longer than others, waiting until the time was right for them. He had the feeling McNeil wouldn't have let him close to her physically anytime soon, even if she hadn't been playing him. Which only made her more attractive.

But tonight he would close his eyes and pretend the girl he was slipping inside was la testa rossa.

"Let's go," he said, and gestured at the door.

62.

T he plane hit the runway with a startling b.u.mp. I grabbed the arms of the seat and looked at my dad. He didn't even flinch. He just continued to argue with me about whether I would go with him to find Charlie. "This is not a play thing, Isabel."

"Not a play thing? I'm not a kid, and I know it's not a play thing, and this is my brother. He hasn't seen you in twenty-two years. He doesn't even know you're alive. If you do find him, you can't just show up out of nowhere. It's bad enough he's been kidnapped..." My voice caught on some tears that flushed up out of nowhere. "How much trauma do you want him to suffer?"

My dad said nothing.

From a few rows behind us, Maggie said, "You guys okay?"

I turned around and glanced at her. Her hair was matted on one side, standing up in golden crests on the other. Maggie, being Maggie, had slept just fine on the flight. Elena didn't look as if she'd even closed her eyes.

"Aunt Elena?" I said. "Do you need anything?"

She sent me a beseeching look, shook her head. My stomach twisted with anguish for her.

Wanting something, anything, to distract me, not knowing what I should say to my dad, I turned back around and took my phone out of my bag, switching it on. A bunch of text messages flooded in. A couple were from Theo. How are you? How is the plane? I can't wait to see you.

I grinned at those texts, seeing his image in my mind. Theo had shown me in Naples and Ischia that he could handle more than just acrobatic s.e.x in my apartment. But now?