*
Inside one of the guest bedrooms, Armando shut his book. Leonora had fallen asleep beside him and she snapped awake and asked what the noise was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It sounded like a gun.”
“The girls!” she cried, heading for the door.
*
“Jimmy!” Wheelock said into his mic. “Report! Marty! Report! Graham! Report!”
“On your right flank, boss,” Graham said. “I see Marty. He’s down. I don’t have Jimmy. There’s at least three shooters in the trees. I’m going to—”
The blond man was crouching behind plastic garbage bins. When Graham passed him, he rose up and executed him at point-blank range, then moved toward a side door of the house.
“Graham, come in,” Wheelock said. “I lost you. Say again.”
Wheelock felt a burning sensation in his forearm as a bullet grazed his skin. He reached the protective cover of the barn and began moving along its side. “Graham,” he said into his mic, “if you can hear me, I’m going to move along the south fence line and outflank them.”
At the corner of the barn, he paused to look through his rifle scope toward the olive grove.
A branch snapped behind him.
He had time to say, “Fuck,” then died.
*
When the blond man entered the girls’ room, still cloaked in his balaclava, Victoria and Elizabeth were bolt upright in bed, Leonora was standing between them, and Armando was clutching a portable phone.
“Down, down,” the intruder said in English, pointing his pistol at the lawyer’s midsection. “Put telephone down.”
Victoria screamed. Leonora was too frightened to comfort her.
“Who are you?” Armando said, dropping the phone onto the rug. “What do you want?”
“No, no, I ask. Who are you?”
“We are their grandparents.”
The man reached into the pocket of his black jacket and took out a roll of duct tape.
“Okay, grandparents. You have choice,” he said. “You do what I say or you can die.”
“What do you want me to do?” Armando said.
He tossed Armando the roll and said, “Lady, sit on chair there. He going to tape hands and feet. Tape them good. Fast, fast.”
Elizabeth shouted, “No, Granddad, don’t hurt her!”
“Don’t worry, child,” Leonora said. “He’s not hurting me.”
“Quiet, you,” the blond man said, pointing his gun at the girl. “Okay, now go round and round. Tape lady to chair. Good man. You do good.”
When Armando had her bound tight, he was ordered to sit in another chair and tape his own feet.
“Good,” the man said, snatching the tape from his hands. “I finish you.” He taped Armando’s hands tightly and looped the tape around the chair-back and his chest several times until he was immobile. Then he ripped off two short lengths of tape and plastered them over his mouth and Leonora’s.
The girls were hysterical now and the man was getting angry at the noise.
“You girls! Quiet! If you no quiet, I put tape on grandparent noses and they die—no air. You want me do?”
Elizabeth looked into the frightened eyes of her grandparents and stopped sobbing.
“Come, Vicky,” she said. “Don’t cry. You’re a big girl and you’re very, very brave.”
Victoria wiped the snot from her nose with the back of her hand and her crying sputtered to a halt.
“Good. Good girls,” the man said. “Come. Spaceship waiting for you.”
23
It was almost midnight when Fabiana Odorico wandered into her boss’s office.
“I saw the light,” she said. “I thought it was only me here.”
Lumaga turned away from his computer. “There’s something wrong with the world when the chiefs work later than everyone else.”
“Maybe it’s why we’re the ones who got the promotions,” she said.
“Promoted at work, demoted at home,” he said. “Anything going on?”
“I stayed late for a call with the Toronto police. They brought in Marco Zuliani for questioning.”
“On what grounds?”
“It turns out that our Zulio is a confidential informant for them. They’ve got a big problem with a lot of competing drug gangs in Toronto. The ’Ndrangheta is only one of them. They’ve got Somalis, Russians, Albanians, Punjabis, biker gangs, white supremacists—all of them competing for turf. Zulio’s been a police CI for years, dishing dirt on his rivals. He’s playing the long game.”
“So, what did he say about his cousin, Matteo, getting dumped in the sea as fish food?”
“Not much. He said he didn’t know anything about the circumstances.”
“Did they tell him that his pal, Ferruccio, got killed?”
“He said he was surprised to hear it. He told them he was a good kid who wasn’t in the business as far as he knew.”
“The business—meaning drugs.”
“That’s right. I had them ask him if Matteo and Ferruccio had anything to do with each other in Spain. He told them he didn’t have any idea.”
“Did they think he was telling the truth?”
“The cop I talked to, who’s been running him for years as an informant, told me he thought he was evasive, but that’s as far as they could take it.”
“So, the Canada connection is dead.”
“As dead as Ferruccio and Cinzia, I’m sorry to say.”
“And the rest of the case?”
“I’ve got nothing. The Spanish authorities have no idea where Ferruccio’s been living in recent years and no information on his source of income, which was considerable. Guess how much money they found in his bank account?”
“I hate guessing games.”
“Seven eighty thousand euros. For the past five years he’s made deposits—in cash—of fifteen thousand euros per month, regular as a clock.”
“How is drug money so regular and uniform?” Lumaga asked.
“Good question—I have no answer. There’s also nothing from the crime scene. The final forensic report is in and the killer left no traces behind. It was very professional. And Cinzia’s background was completely clean. I think she took in an old boyfriend and got caught in
