Red, White & Dead. Laura Caldwell

a neighbor screamed from an apartment next door. Police arrived at the scene and found McNeil lying dead beside his truck, the victim of a stabbing to his chest and abdomen, his wallet stolen. The keys were still in the ignition.

      8

      Dez Romano watched Michael DeSanto pace his office.

      “We’ve gone over this,” Michael said, “but there’s got to be something I’m missing, you know?”

      Dez decided to say nothing.

      Michael kept pacing. “When my wife met her last year, she said her name was Isabel Bristol. She said she was a lawyer who moved here from L.A.”

      “Did you have someone check the California Bar records?”

      “Yeah. No one with that name.”

      Dez reached forward to his desk and picked up a program from the Naples opera house, which he’d gotten on his trip there two weeks ago. The opera had been Puccini’s Turandot. He leafed through the program, remembering the heat in the opera house, the women waving fans in front of their faces, the swell of the orchestra’s music, the lone, clear note of the alto that cut through the heat and made everyone think of no one but her.

      Michael kept pacing, kept talking about the redhead. Even though he was out on bail for the money laundering he’d done for Dez and the Camorra, the case, from what Dez had heard, was nearly lock solid. Michael would most likely be heading to a federal pen for something like ten years. Dez’s source had also told him that although the authorities could prove Michael had been laundering funds for a company in the suburbs called Advent Corporation, they couldn’t tie the ownership of the company to Dez or anyone in the Camorra. The attorneys Dez had originally paid to structure Advent Corporation had charged him astronomically, but they’d been worth every penny.

      As far as Dez could tell, it was only Michael, and his word, that could bring Dez down, and so Dez wanted to keep Michael as happy as possible, until he could pat him on the shoulder and tell him he’d see him after prison. He had promised Michael that he would always have a job with him, a place in Dez’s system, and a hell of a lot of money when he got out. And Michael was happy to be a cog in the wheel.

      So now Dez watched Michael stalk and talk in front of his desk. It was tough to take Michael’s energy. Dez tuned him out. He was thinking of that alto, and yes, he was thinking of the redhead. In fact, he’d been thinking of little but her since Sunday night when he’d first seen her at the bar, her head dipped down toward her cell phone, her face grimacing at what she read there, the way the purple silk of her dress had slipped down one shoulder. At that moment, she struck him as exactly the kind of woman he wanted now that he was divorced. She looked educated, well brought up. But she also looked like a hell of a lot of fun.

      And he’d been right. Dinner was a blast. And a turn-on.

      But sex wasn’t why he was thinking about her now. No, not at all. Another emotion drove his thoughts, one just as primal, but much more violent.

      9

      “What was dad working on when he died?”

      My mother turned from the kitchen counter, where she was collecting her cell phone, putting it in her purse. Since I’d come out of her library, she had been talking about Spence, how it was so funny that sometimes he couldn’t seem to dress himself. I hadn’t known how to segue into the topic again, so I just blurted it out.

      My mom cocked her head. I watched her intently for her reaction, not wanting to upset her, but she just blinked a few times, shook her head a little as if she was surprised, and said, “Why these questions all of a sudden?”

      I was sitting on a tall chair at the island. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about him, I guess.”

      She turned back to her purse. “It makes sense, I suppose.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Well, you’re at a transition point in your life, a time when you can go one way or another, and it’s usually at those times that we look back and try to make some sense of it all, see if we’ve done the right things, if we’ve ended up with the right people. And we remember people who aren’t with us anymore.”

      “Is that what you do? I mean, do you think about whether you ended up with the right people, wonder if you did the right things?”

      My mother turned around again and looked at me. She put her hands on the counter behind her and leaned back.

      In the last year, I had learned something about Victoria McNeil, something she thought no one else would ever know. We hadn’t spoken about it since. Not directly. But now, I think we both knew I was referring, obliquely, to the topic, and yet we both knew the specifics would remain unspoken. My mother was from the school of holding your emotional cards close to your heart, and after all she’d been through in her life, I respected that.

      A thump from above us, then another. Spence dropping something upstairs. He could be clumsy, especially when he was distracted and running late. My mother smiled at the sound. “I ended up with the right people,” she said. “And you?”

      “Well, since I haven’t ended up with anyone, it’s kind of hard to say right now.”

      “What about that young guy you mentioned?”

      I laughed a little. I hadn’t told my mother how young he was.

      “What?” she said.

      “Nothing. I saw him last night.”

      “Fun?”

      I remembered the feel of my legs around him, my back against the rough wall of the stairwell. I thought of him later in bed, curving around me, how he fell asleep first and I traced the ribbon of red tattooed in a trail down his arm. “Yeah, it was fun.”

      “And so?”

      I shrugged. “Who knows?”

      Theo hadn’t said anything specific about getting together again. It gave me a tickle of discomfort. Was all that stuff about dying to see me just about one thing—sex? Then again, what did I care?

      “And how’s Sam?” my mom asked.

      “We haven’t spoken in a few weeks.”

      “Do you miss him?”

      I shifted around on the chair. “Yes. And no. I mean, I miss lots of things about him, and I miss having someone in my life, but sometimes I don’t mind being alone. I don’t mind deciding what I want to eat for dinner and what I want to do for the weekend. I like that part a lot.” I looked down at the book my dad used to read me, played with its cover. Inside, I had tucked the clipping about my grandfather’s death. “But then again, sometimes it’s lonely.”

      My mother chuckled. “And so goes the circle of life.” She nodded at the book. “So all this about your dad …”

      “Yeah, I don’t know.” You’re okay now, Boo.

      My mother stood away from the counter, collecting other things in her purse—her keys, a small water bottle. “You asked what he was working on when he died. I don’t know all the specifics. I really never did. Your dad didn’t talk much when it came to his work.”

      “Didn’t that bother you?”

      “No. I knew he had to keep quiet because he was working sensitive cases.”

      “He worked for the Detroit police, right? Wasn’t it just the usual robberies and stuff?”

      “Your father worked out of the Detroit police office, and yes, he worked on things like robberies and even a serial killer, but he also profiled for the federal government. The primary case he was working on when he died was federal.”

      “What was it?”

      “A Mob case. The killing of the Rizzato Brothers.”