Chapter 3 - THE MAN WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD
Vincent got Cara into the back seat of his armored SUV and told his driver to take the long route to her apartment. He did not explain why. He watched the mirrors until the black sedan failed to reappear.
“Are we in danger?” Cara asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“I’m not going to lie to you just to make you feel better.”
“Good. I’d hate for tonight to become even more unusual.”
The humor faded as she saw his hands. They were still, but the knuckles had gone white. Vincent had once told her that fear was useful only when it made a person pay attention. He was paying attention to every passing car, every intersection, every shadow near the curb.
At her building, he insisted on checking the lobby. Cara let him, but stopped him at the elevator.
“You said you wouldn’t pretend the conversation didn’t happen,” she reminded him.
“I remember.”
“Then give me one honest answer before you go. When you said I was never a stranger, was that all you meant?”
Vincent looked at her for a long moment. “No.”
It was only one word, but she carried it upstairs like a small flame cupped against the wind.
He waited until her apartment door closed, then called Marco.
“Find the sedan. Quietly. I want to know how it got near the restaurant and who is driving it.”
“We already have a lead,” Marco said. “The plates belong to a dead man.”
“I saw him.”
A pause. “Then we have a bigger problem.”
The driver’s name was Adrian Vale, once Vincent’s closest lieutenant and the man who had supposedly died in a warehouse fire seven years earlier. Vale had handled the books for a network of businesses Vincent had spent years trying to separate from the violent old structure that built his fortune. He had also been the last person to see Vincent’s wife, Elena, alive before the car crash that killed her.
Vincent had never believed the official story completely. But grief had made him choose the explanation that allowed him to keep breathing.
At dawn, Marco arrived at Vincent’s house with a file and a face like stone. “The warehouse fire was staged. No body was ever positively identified. Vale has been moving money through shell companies for years.”
“Why show himself now?”
Marco slid a photograph across the desk. It showed Cara leaving her flower shop two days earlier. A red circle had been drawn around her face.
Vincent’s anger arrived cold. “Who took this?”
“We’re trying to find out. There’s more.” Marco placed another photograph beside it. Cara, standing in front of her shop, was talking to a woman in a gray coat. The woman’s face was partly turned away, but Vincent knew the profile.
“Elena,” he whispered.
Marco didn’t correct him. He didn’t need to. The woman looked exactly like Vincent’s late wife, down to the small crescent-shaped scar near her left ear.
“That’s impossible,” Vincent said.
“Maybe it’s someone who looks like her.”
“Or maybe someone wants me to think she’s alive.”
His phone rang. Cara.
“I found something in my shop,” she said. Her voice was steady, but he could hear fear beneath it. “A package was left under the back door. It has your name on it. And mine.”
“Don’t open it. Lock the doors. I’m coming.”
“Vincent, I already opened it.”
He closed his eyes. “What was inside?”
“A key. An old photograph. And a note that says, ‘Ask what happened the night Elena died.’”
For a moment, he could not hear anything but his own pulse.
“Cara,” he said carefully, “did you know my wife before you met me?”
Silence.
May you like
Then she whispered, “I was hoping you’d never have to ask me that.”
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