Chapter 5 - The Dead Man's Account
Mateo did not reach for the weapon.
He told me to examine the warning logically.
If Luca wanted to expose him, why place the message in my office where a child might find it?
He admitted something far worse before I could answer.
Victor had hired him years before Luca vanished.
His assignment had included investigating Luca.
Three weeks before the disappearance, Mateo followed Luca to a Brooklyn warehouse.
Luca caught him and warned him that Victor would destroy the family.
The night before Luca vanished, he gave Mateo a torn note with three words.
Protect my brother.
Mateo had built his entire eleven-year service to me around that promise.
Then he revealed a silver key Luca had given him.
Emma recognized it.
"Daddy says it opens the wolf's stomach," she said.
I knew immediately what she meant.
The cellar of the Vermont house contained an old cast-iron boiler decorated with a wolf.
The brass key Clara carried and the silver key Mateo carried were two halves of a mechanism.
Reeves called with more news.
The recent Luca DNA sample had been collected at St. Agnes Rehabilitation Center in northern Vermont.
The clinic had burned eight months earlier.
A patient registered as Luke Vance had supposedly died there, but no body had been recovered.
The facility was secretly funded by Vale Horizon Trust.
The trustee was my mother, Eleanor Vale.
My mother had financed the institution for twelve years.
We left Manhattan in an unmarked armored SUV.
No corporate jet.
No Vale driver.
No official route.
On the road north, an unidentified sedan began following us.
The passenger was Darius Cole.
He opened fire.
Mateo rammed his sedan into a tree, but before we could escape another group of armed men blocked the road ahead.
Victor called my satellite phone.
He told me something I did not believe until Darius began shooting at the gunmen instead of us.
"Those men don't work for me," Victor said.
May you like
"You're chasing the wrong enemy."
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