Chapter 2 - A Camera That Wasn't Mine
I climbed onto a milk crate and pulled the tiny camera from the ceiling while Matteo stood below, looking angrier with every second.
The device had no visible brand or serial number.
Its battery was warm.
Whoever installed it had been transmitting moments ago.
"Don't smash it," I told Matteo when he reached for it. "It may tell us who owns it."
The woman on my phone was retired Army investigator Dana Mercer, the only supervisor who had ever believed my suspicions about Victor Bell.
She had gone quiet after the case collapsed and had refused to discuss it for years.
Now she sounded frightened.
"An access request hit the archive at 3:42 a.m.," she said. "Your name. Your old investigation code. Somebody wanted the witness appendix."
"Who's running it?"
"The request came through a contractor account at Dunleavy Logistics."
I knew that name.
A warehouse company in South Philadelphia that had outgrown every competitor with suspicious speed.
Matteo heard it and turned pale.
"Dunleavy stores cargo for my uncle Dominic."
"You have an uncle?"
"Unfortunately."
Dana told me not to go to the police until she could authenticate the archive access.
That was a hard instruction to hear from someone who had spent her career teaching me to preserve evidence and trust the chain of custody.
But the man knocking at my front door had already claimed to be a city inspector.
I could hear him arguing with somebody outside.
Sofia sat on a flour sack, staring at the floor.
I knelt beside her and offered a small notebook.
"You don't have to speak if you don't want to. Draw what you remember."
She took the pencil.
Her first drawing was not a face.
It was a window divided into four narrow panes.
Below it she drew a circle and three lines.
"Is this the hospital?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"A room. Before the hospital."
Matteo leaned forward.
"What room?"
Sofia recoiled, and his expression crumpled.
I put a hand up to stop him.
"One question at a time."
Outside, a truck engine roared to life.
A moment later something struck the front shutter hard enough to shake the display case.
They were testing the entrance.
Matteo's phone buzzed.
The screen showed his uncle Dominic's name.
He answered on speaker without my permission.
"Matteo," Dominic said warmly. "I heard you found a new favorite bakery."
I watched Sofia's pencil stop.
"Stay away from her," Matteo replied.
"From whom?"
"You know exactly who."
Dominic chuckled.
"Bring the girl home before your little distraction becomes a family embarrassment."
The call ended.
Sofia slowly turned the notebook toward me.
Under the sketch she'd written two words in block capitals: DOMINIC'S HOUSE.
A cold certainty settled over me.
This wasn't some outsider trying to extort a mob boss.
Matteo's own family had a connection to Sofia's memory, and someone was desperate to interrupt it.
I moved a rack away from the wall, revealing the narrow old coal passage my grandmother had kept sealed behind shelving.
"Where does that go?" Matteo asked.
"Under the neighboring building."
"Is it safe?"
"Safer than discussing our plans into a camera someone else installed."
We crawled into the passage with Sofia between us.
Behind us, glass broke at the front of the bakery.
Matteo looked back once.
I had expected rage from him.
Instead he whispered, "I'm sorry."
"Apologize when she's safe," I said.
At the far end of the tunnel, my phone vibrated with a message from Dana.
It contained a single grainy photo from the archive.
The man called Victor Bell was standing beside my grandmother Rose.
Between them was a child with Sofia's eyes.
May you like
Dana's next message read: THIS ISN'T JUST YOUR CASE. IT'S YOUR FAMILY.
