Chapter 3 - The Wolves at the Perimeter
The private clinic on the second floor of Blackwood Hall had once been my mother’s music room. Now, under the harsh white glare of portable halogen lamps, it looked like an emergency field hospital.
Dr. Richard Mercer, who had kept the Caruso family’s bullet wounds out of police blotters for forty years, adjusted his gold-rimmed bifocals and stared at the digital readout on the centrifuge unit.
The hum of the machine was the only sound in the room, save for the rhythmic, muffled ticking of the rain against the leaded glass windows. Grace was asleep on a broad leather ottoman, wrapped in a cashmere blanket that had been pulled from the cedar chests in the attic. One of her hands was still clamped around the synthetic ear of the matted plush bear.
Hannah sat in a straight-backed mahogany chair six feet away, her eyes locked on the child. She had refused to change out of her gray maid's dress, though Vincent had brought her a wool sweater and a cup of black tea that had long since gone cold.
Mercer pulled the printout from the thermal feed. He tore the strip with a dry rasp of paper, read it once, read it twice, and then took off his glasses.
"Well?" I said, leaning against the cold marble mantelpiece.
"Ninety-nine point nine eight percent," Mercer said softly. "Based on your markers and the tissue samples we preserved from Julian’s dental records after the Montauk inquest. There's no variance, Dante. She's his. Biologically, genetically... she’s a Caruso."
Hannah didn't cry. She simply let out a long, ragged exhale that sounded like air escaping a punctured tire, and dropped her forehead into her hands.
"The amber ring in the iris?" I asked.
"Axenfeld-Rieger anomaly," Mercer muttered, packing his swabs into a stainless steel case. "Dominant trait in your bloodline. Your father had it. Julian had it. Now she has it. You don't need a lab to tell you that, Dante. You knew the second she looked at you."
"The child’s health?"
"Underweight by about three pounds. Mild vitamin D deficiency—hardly surprising if she’s been tucked away in the back of this mausoleum for five months. But her lungs are clear, her reflexes are sharp, and her heart..." Mercer smiled faintly, a tired, cynical twitch of his lips. "Her heart beats like an engine. Julian’s heart."
"Thank you, Richard."
Mercer hesitated, his leather bag half-buckled. "Dante... if she's Julian's, she holds the tie-breaker vote in the maritime trust. Vance knows it. Moretti knows it. The moment this gets out, every wolf who smelled Julian’s blood off Montauk will realize they left the den occupied."
"Then we don't let it get out," I said.
The heavy mahogany doors swung inward before Mercer could respond. Vincent stepped into the room, his gray suit spattered with dark dots of rain. He didn't look at Hannah, nor at the sleeping child. His eyes were fixed entirely on me.
"Mr. Dante. A vehicle just passed the south gate."
I checked my watch. "It’s two in the morning. Vance left three hours ago."
"It isn't Vance," Vincent said. His voice was lower than usual, stripped of its domestic veneer. "It’s a black Mercedes S-Class, plates registered to a leasing firm in Newark. Luca Moretti is in the back seat. He’s at the gatehouse now, claiming he has a maritime lease addendum that requires your personal counter-signature before the five o’clock exchange."
A cold wire tightened in my gut.
Luca Moretti didn't run errands at two in the morning unless he smelled meat. He was twenty-eight, the nephew of old Bernardo Moretti, and had spent the last two years systematically executing everyone who stood between him and the Newark dry-docks. He was the one who had claimed to find the wreckage of Julian's skiff off Montauk.
"How many men?" I asked.
"Two in the car," Vincent said. "A chase vehicle stayed on the highway shoulder three hundred yards down. Probably four more with automatic rifles."
Hannah rose from her chair like a ghost, her face hollowed out by fear. "He's here. Evan told me about him. He said if Luca Moretti ever came to this house while I was here, I had to take the baby into the cellar and never come out."
I walked over to the ottoman, looked down at Grace, and carefully tucked the edge of the cashmere blanket around her shoulder. She stirred, let out a tiny, whistling breath through her nose, and settled again.
"You won't be going to the cellar, Hannah," I said.
"Mr. Caruso, you don't understand—"
"This is Blackwood," I said, turning to face her. "My grandfather built this house in nineteen-thirty-two with six-inch reinforced concrete behind every course of limestone. There are three thousand rounds of seven-point-six-two NATO in the gun room, and seven men on this perimeter who served in the First Recon Battalion. Nobody enters this house unless I invite them. And nobody takes anything from it while I draw breath."
I looked at Vincent. "Let Luca through the gate. Let his car come up the drive. But tell the boys on the terrace to keep the crosshairs on the driver’s ear the entire time he’s parked."
"And the baby, sir?"
May you like
"The baby stays with her mother," I said, reaching into my holster to check the slide on my custom Sig Sauer P226. The steel made a sharp, clean *clack* in the quiet room. "In my study. Behind the oak desk."
***
