Chapter 8 - The Arrest That Never Happened
The detective's name was Patrick Keene.
He sounded professional, but he refused to say where the accelerant container had been recovered.
That omission mattered.
An honest investigator might withhold details, but he had volunteered the one detail guaranteed to frighten me.
"I'll meet you at headquarters with counsel," I said.
"Come alone."
"That's not how this works."
"It is if you want to keep the girl out of this."
He ended the call.
Dana stared at my phone.
"That wasn't an invitation to interview."
"No," I said. "It was a location probe."
I arranged through a lawyer to confirm whether the detective existed and whether a formal warrant had been issued.
No warrant appeared.
Keene was real, but he was on administrative leave.
Someone had been using his number.
Matteo said Dominic could make that happen.
I had stopped being impressed by Dominic's reach and started thinking about his limits.
He needed to scare us into moving without planning.
That meant our evidence was becoming dangerous.
We decided to go to Camden in two vehicles, with no one outside the room knowing the route.
Isabella drove Sofia and Dana.
Matteo came with me.
As we crossed the river, he admitted that Dominic had effectively raised him after his father died.
"I thought he was protecting the family," he said.
"What changed?"
"Sofia. When she stopped speaking, he seemed relieved."
He looked out at the bridge cables.
"I was too busy punishing people who asked questions to notice that the answers were inside my own house."
I had no comforting reply.
At the Camden address we found a modest duplex with a tidy garden and curtains pulled tight.
An elderly woman answered after the third knock.
She had silver hair, a steady gaze, and a scar near one eyebrow.
"Emily Carter," she said before I introduced myself.
"You look like Rose when she was angry."
I showed her the key.
Her face changed.
"You shouldn't have brought that here."
"My grandmother said you know everything."
"Your grandmother spent her whole life making sure you didn't have to know."
We entered a sitting room full of plants and family photographs, none of which showed Eleanor as a child.
When I asked about the 1978 fire, she refused to answer until Sofia arrived.
At the sight of the girl, Eleanor covered her mouth.
"Lucia's eyes," she whispered.
Sofia approached her with unusual confidence.
"Grandma said you were her sister."
Eleanor began to cry without sound.
Matteo stepped back.
"That's impossible. Lucia was an only child."
Eleanor shook her head.
"That's what they wrote in the records."
She took the photograph from Sofia and pointed to the scratched-out girl.
"That was me."
I looked at the two women who were supposed to have shared no family connection.
Eleanor explained that Enzo had erased her after she witnessed him ordering the warehouse fire.
Lucia, his wife, helped Rose hide the child.
The story had been buried under forged birth records and a staged river accident.
"Why would Lucia call you her sister?" Matteo asked.
Eleanor looked at him sadly.
"Because I wasn't Enzo's daughter. I was his wife's younger sister. Your grandmother's sister, and the only living witness to what he did."
That corrected the family's official history in one sentence.
Then Eleanor said something worse.
"The fire wasn't meant to destroy a warehouse. It was meant to kill your father."
Matteo stared at her.
"My father wasn't born yet."
May you like
"Not your father," she whispered to me. "Emily's."
