Chapter 4: The Man Who Stayed
The address in Astoria was a narrow two-story above a dry cleaner on a street that smelled of exhaust and old brick.
The kind of building nobody looked at twice.
That was the point.
I went alone.
Vincent had offered to send two men.
I told him no.
If Marco saw a car he recognized, he would run, and a man running was harder to talk to than a man sitting down.
I parked around the corner and walked.
The street door was unlocked.
I went up the stairs without knocking and tried the handle at the top.
Also unlocked.
Marco Vitelli was sitting at a kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a phone he dropped the moment he saw me.
He was fifty-one years old, thick across the shoulders, with a scar along his jaw from a disagreement in 2009 that I had personally resolved on his behalf.
He had been with the organization for nineteen years.
He stood up fast.
"Sit down," I said.
He sat.
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down too.
I did not reach for the g*n.
I wanted him to wonder why.
"You sent me a message," I said.
"I don't know what you're—"
"Marco."
He stopped.
"You told my staff I called you in this morning.
I didn't.
You were in that house when my daughters pointed at your face in a photograph and told me you were in Garden City the morning Isabelle d*ed." I set my phone on the table between us, screen up.
"And then you sent me a message telling me I wasn't supposed to come home early.
So let's not do this part where you don't know what I'm talking about.
It wastes both of our time and I am not in a patient mood."
His jaw moved.
No sound came out.
"Who paid you?" I asked.
"Dominic—"
"Who paid you to stay in my house?"
"It wasn't — it wasn't like that.
It wasn't about the money."
"Then what was it about?"
He looked at the table.
His hands were flat against the surface, fingers spread, the way a man holds himself down when every instinct is telling him to move.
"They told me she was going to leave you," he said.
"Isabelle.
They said she had found something she wasn't supposed to find and she was going to take the girls and disappear.
They said if that happened, everything would unravel.
The whole operation.
Everything you'd built."
I kept my voice very even.
"Who told you that."
"They said it was coming from inside.
That she'd been talking to people she shouldn't have been talking to."
"That is not what I asked you."
He looked up.
His eyes were red at the edges.
"Caruso," he said.
"It came from Caruso."
The name landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
Enzo Caruso.
My father's oldest friend.
The man who had introduced me to this life at the age of nineteen.
The man who had sat in the front row at my wedding and wept when Isabelle walked down the aisle.
The man who had held Nora as an infant and called her bella piccola and kissed her forehead.
The man who had been at my house for dinner eleven days after Isabelle was kjlled, eating pasta and telling me he was sorry for my loss.
"He told you she was a threat," I said.
"He told me she had to be handled.
He said you'd authorized it.
That you knew and you couldn't be the one to do it yourself because—"
"I authorized nothing."
Marco's face collapsed.
"Dominic.
I swear to God, he told me you—"
"I authorized nothing." My voice did not rise.
It never needed to.
"Isabelle was thirty-five years old.
She was picking up our daughter from preschool.
She was not a threat to anything.
She was my wife."
The silence that followed was the worst kind.
The kind where a man finally understands the full weight of what he has done and there is nowhere left to put it.
"He said she'd found the Brennan accounts," Marco said quietly.
"That she was going to go to the FBI."
I said nothing.
"Was it true?" he asked.
"It doesn't matter now."
"Dominic—"
"It doesn't matter," I said again, "because even if every word of it were true, you do not touch my wife.
You do not touch the mother of my children.
You come to me.
You always come to me." I stood up.
"You have been sitting inside my house for fourteen months watching my daughters not speak.
Watching them grieve.
Watching me bring in specialists and doctors and every kind of help I could find.
And you said nothing."
He had no answer for that.
There was no answer for that.
"You're going to write down everything Caruso told you," I said.
"Every conversation.
Every date.
Every location.
Every word.
You're going to write it down and sign it and you're going to do it tonight."
"And then what?"
I picked up my phone from the table.
"And then we'll see."
I walked to the door.
Behind me, I heard Marco's chair scrape against the floor — not standing up, just shifting, the movement of a man who had nowhere to go and had only just realized it.
"Dominic." His voice cracked on the second syllable.
"I'm sorry."
I stopped with my hand on the doorframe.
"Tell that to Sophie," I said.
"She's five years old and she just said her first words in fourteen months.
May you like
She used them to name you."
I left him with that.
