Chapter 6 - The Man Who Sent Me Into the Lion’s Den
Thomas Keane called the next morning.
I didn’t answer.
He called again.
Then a text arrived.
We need to talk.
Adrian read it.
“You trust him?”
“Yesterday I would have said yes.”
“And today?”
“Today I audit him.”
That became our rule.
No assumptions.
Only evidence.
Keane had supervised me for four years.
He had been there when I won my first major fraud case.
He had attended my mother’s birthday once.
He knew about my father.
Or I thought he knew only what I had told him.
The financial records suggested otherwise.
Payments from a Salvatore-controlled company had moved through an account connected to Keane’s brother-in-law.
It wasn’t proof.
But it was enough to ask questions.
I agreed to meet Keane in a public café.
Adrian sat three tables away.
Keane arrived looking exhausted.
“You found Salvatore.”
“You knew I would.”
He didn’t deny it.
“Why did you recommend me for Moretti?”
“Because I needed someone Salvatore couldn’t buy.”
“You could have told me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you would have gone after him emotionally.”
I stared at him.
“You used my father.”
“I used your skills.”
“You used both.”
Keane lowered his voice.
“Salvatore has had people inside government agencies for years.”
“Are you one of them?”
His face tightened.
“No.”
“Then explain the account.”
He did.
His brother-in-law had been cooperating secretly with investigators.
The payments were controlled transfers.
I didn’t believe him.
Not yet.
“Proof.”
Keane slid a sealed envelope across the table.
Inside were authorization documents.
Dates.
Signatures.
Case numbers.
I checked them later.
They were real.
Keane hadn’t betrayed me.
But he had manipulated me.
I didn’t forgive that.
Not immediately.
He accepted it.
Then he told me something worse.
Salvatore had not ordered my father’s death alone.
Someone else approved it.
“Who?”
“We don’t know.”
The investigation had uncovered a recording from twelve years earlier.
Two voices.
Salvatore.
And an unidentified man.
The second voice said:
Russo cannot reach the authorities.
My father’s death had required approval from someone powerful enough that even Salvatore had asked permission.
Adrian listened to the recording that evening.
He replayed it three times.
Then went pale.
“You recognize him.”
Adrian said nothing.
“Who is it?”
He looked at me.
“My father.”
Lorenzo Moretti.
The man my father had trusted with the second ledger.
The man my mother believed had tried to help him.
I felt physically sick.
Adrian walked away.
“My father ordered Vittorio’s death.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I know his voice.”
The revelation broke something in Adrian.
For years, he had believed Lorenzo was flawed but ultimately honorable.
Now his dead father stood at the center of a murder.
Then I noticed something in the recording.
The unidentified voice sounded strained.
A strange rhythm.
I isolated the audio.
There was another sound beneath the words.
A train.
A station announcement.
Keane’s analysts traced it.
The recording had been made near Union Station.
But Lorenzo had been documented at a hospital across town that evening.
Someone had imitated his voice.
Or edited the recording.
The truth shifted again.
Then Keane called.
“We found the original tape.”
“And?”
“The voice isn’t Lorenzo.”
“Who?”
Keane paused.
“Marco’s mother.”
Adrian stared at me.
His mother, Isabella Moretti, had supposedly died eight years earlier.
Except Keane had discovered something else.
There was no death certificate.
No burial permit.
No official record of her death.
Adrian whispered:
“My mother is alive.”
May you like
And somewhere, a woman who had vanished eight years ago might know exactly who killed my father.
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