Chapter 7 - THE SACRED RECORD
The words hit the room like a physical concussion.
Father Thomas. The baby’s footprint.
Moretti surged up from his leather chair, swinging his heavy ebony cane with vicious intent straight toward Leo’s head. “Shut that idiot’s mouth!”
Dante intercepted the blow with his bare forearm. The solid wood cracked against Dante’s bone with a dull thud, but Dante didn't even flinch. His left hand shot forward, wrapping around Moretti’s throat like an iron collar, slamming the seventy-two-year-old patriarch backward over the coffee table, scattering the velvet jewelry box and its contents across the marble.
“Don't you ever raise a hand to this boy,” Dante growled, his voice vibrating with such primal savagery that Moretti’s guards immediately dropped their weapons onto the floor, hands raised high in surrender.
Tommy kicked the dropped pistols away into the dark corners of the room. “Boss, what do we do with them?”
“Lock them in the wine cellar,” Dante commanded, not releasing his grip on Moretti’s throat until the older man’s face turned purple. “Strip them of their phones and radios. If any of them makes a sound, shoot them through the iron grate.”
Dante dropped Moretti onto the floor, where the old man lay coughing and clutching his neck, his fine overcoat bunched and ruined.
I rushed forward and pulled Leo against my side, checking his head and shoulders with frantic hands. “Leo, are you okay? Did he touch you?”
“The blue roof,” Leo whispered, his fingers gripping the tiny diary key so hard the brass edge bit into his palm. “Father Thomas has the candles that smell like honey. Clara cried in the little room with the screen. She told him the baby’s name is Gabriel.”
Dante went completely rigid.
He slowly turned to look at Leo. The ruthless mob boss looked as if he had been struck by lightning. “Gabriel?” Dante whispered, his voice cracking down the middle. “She... she chose Gabriel?”
“She wrote it in the front of the black book,” Leo said, nodding with that absolute, unshakeable certainty that only his autistic memory could hold. “Gabriel Dante Marino. Seven pounds, two ounces on the clinic paper. She said the daddy has the same hands.”
Dante closed his eyes, his chest heaving as a single, silent tear carved a path through the dust on his cheek. For nine years, he had believed his child had died nameless, an abstract tragedy in a charred wreck on the highway.
Now, through the memory of a boy everyone had discarded as broken, his son had a name.
“St. Michael’s on 18th Street,” I said, looking at Dante with urgent clarity. “It has the bright blue ceramic tile roof. Father Thomas was my family’s parish priest for thirty years before he retired to the rectory.”
“Father Thomas didn't retire,” Dante said, his voice instantly regaining its steely resolve as he wiped his face. “Arthur Moretti had him transferred to a quiet parish in Joliet two weeks after Clara’s funeral.”
Moretti laughed from the floor, a raspy, blood-flecked rattle. “You’re too late, Dante. You think I didn't search that parish? Arthur had the rectory gutted six years ago during the diocese renovation. If there was a book, it’s in a landfill in Indiana.”
“You didn't know where to look,” Leo murmured, staring at the embers in the hearth. “Clara didn't put it in the wall. The water doesn't reach the well under the bell tower. You need the brass rope to pull the bucket.”
Dante didn't waste another second. He grabbed his coat from the chair. “Tommy, take Sal and lock him in the vault with the others. Emily, get in the car. We’re going to Joliet.”
“We can’t leave Leo here,” I insisted, holding my brother’s hand tightly.
“Leo comes with us,” Dante said, looking directly into my eyes with an intensity that made my heart race. “He’s never leaving our sight again.”
Twenty minutes later, we were speeding south on Interstate 55 in Dante’s personal sedan, leaving Chicago’s glittering skyline behind us in the freezing sleet. Leo sat in the back seat, staring out the window, his hand holding mine through the gap between the bucket seats.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Dante asked quietly as he drove through the dark industrial corridor of Plainfield.
“Tell you what?”
“That your brother remembered everything,” he said. “For three years, you worked ten feet from my desk. You never asked for a raise, you never complained about the hours, and you never told me your brother was connected to Clara.”
I looked down at my worn boots. “Because I thought you were the man who ordered the hit on my parents’ car.”
Dante’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned ivory. “You thought I murdered your family... and you still came to work for me every day?”
“I had eight thousand dollars a month in medical bills to pay, Mr. Marino,” I said, my voice thick with all the unshed grief of the last six years. “My brother needed speech therapy, occupational therapy, and a room with medical supervision. Pride doesn't pay for physical therapy. Hate doesn't buy prescription anticonvulsants. I would have worked for the devil himself to make sure Leo had a safe bed.”
Dante glanced at me, his dark eyes brimming with an emotion that transcended guilt, sorrow, or debt. It was pure, unadulterated reverence.
“You’re the strongest person I have ever met in my life, Emily,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Before I could process the gravity of his words, the car’s dashboard screen flashed red.
An incoming emergency call from the Chicago Police Department dispatch frequency override crackled through the speakers:
May you like
ALL UNITS: 10-99 IN PROGRESS AT ST. JUDE'S PARISH IN JOLIET. REPORT OF ARMED INTRUSION AT THE RECTORY. SUSPECT VEHICLE IDENTIFIED AS A COUNTY SHERIFF'S INTERCEPTOR.
Judge Arthur Moretti was already there.
