Chapter 20 - ELENA MORETTI
Luca refused to believe it.
He drove personally to the cemetery.
Della went with him.
So did Detective Ellis.
The Moretti family mausoleum stood beneath gray morning clouds.
Workers had already opened Elena Moretti's vault.
Empty.
No coffin.
No remains.
Only concrete.
Luca stared for several minutes.
"My mother had a funeral."
Mara nodded.
"You saw the coffin?"
"Yes."
"Open?"
"No."
"Who arranged the burial?"
Luca already knew.
Arthur Mercer.
The betrayal suddenly became larger than business.
Della stood beside him.
"You don't have to do this now."
"Yes, I do."
His voice was quiet.
"For eight years, everybody decided what I was allowed to know."
He looked at her.
"I think you understand that."
She did.
Records showed Elena Moretti had supposedly died at a private medical facility after a long illness.
That facility had closed five years earlier.
Its director had moved overseas.
Its records had burned in a warehouse accident.
Every road returned to disappearance.
By evening, Mara found something.
A passenger manifest.
Six years earlier.
Two days after Elena's funeral.
A private aircraft owned by a Vance shell company had departed for Switzerland.
Passenger listed as E. Martin.
Age matched Elena.
Passport number belonged to a dead woman.
Luca stared at the document.
"She was alive."
"Possibly."
"Why leave?"
Nobody knew.
Then Della remembered the ledger.
FOUNDING MEMBER.
Maybe Elena had not been escaping Arthur.
Maybe she had been part of what Arthur protected.
Luca understood the same thing.
"If my mother was the Architect..."
Della shook her head.
"We don't know that."
"She was on the board."
"So were six other people."
"She faked her death."
"We don't know why."
Luca looked toward the city lights.
"How many excuses are you going to make for a woman you never met?"
Della's answer was immediate.
"None."
"I'm stopping you from convicting someone because you're hurt."
Luca looked at her.
She continued.
"You've spent your whole life around people who treat suspicion like proof."
"Don't become them."
That reached him.
His shoulders slowly lowered.
"You're infuriating."
"So I've been told."
Owen called that night.
He had found something inside one of his old encrypted backups.
A photograph.
Taken three months earlier.
Before his disappearance.
Conrad Vance leaving a restaurant.
Arthur Mercer walking behind him.
And across the street, entering a black sedan, was a woman Owen had assumed was an employee.
Luca stared at the image.
His hand began shaking.
Older.
Thinner.
Gray in her hair.
But unmistakable.
May you like
Elena Moretti.
His supposedly dead mother had been in the city three months ago.
