Chapter 6 - The Key in the Music Box
The satellite phone clicked dead in Dante’s hand, leaving only the roar of the Manhattan rain hammering against the open doors of the decoy van on Eleventh Avenue.
I stared down at the single little pink sneaker lying on the metal floor of the van, picked it up with both hands, and pressed it tightly against my chest as my mind raced in shock.
"How could that man possibly know about the brass key on Marcus’s neck chain," I whispered, looking up at Dante with wide, terrified eyes.
"Tell me about the key, Marissa, did the medical examiner give it to you after the fire," Dante asked urgently as he guided me back into the armored Escalade and barked an order to his driver to head straight across the Queensboro Bridge toward my apartment.
"Yes, when the fire marshal brought me Marcus’s wedding ring and his charred silver neck chain three days after the restaurant burned down, there was a small flat brass key with the number four-zero-three stamped on the bow hanging beside his cross," I explained rapidly as the Escalade wove through the bridge approach at eighty miles per hour.
"The fire investigator told me it was just a standard restaurant staff padlock key for the basement wine cages, so I placed it inside the velvet lining of Sophie’s wooden ballerina music box on my dresser and haven’t touched it in two years," I said.
Dante’s dark eyes narrowed sharply as he exchanged a look with Vincent Russo in the front passenger seat.
"The basement wine cages at Cena D’Oro used electronic magnetic keycards, Marissa, there hasn’t been a brass key lock in that restaurant since my father renovated the building in two thousand and ten," Dante told me grimly.
"Then what does Box Four-Zero-Three open, and why has the arsonist who murdered Marcus been hunting for it for two years," I asked as my pulse quickened.
"Because the night Cena D’Oro burned, your husband did not just stumble onto the thermite bomb in the ventilation shaft by accident—he must have taken something from the killer before the fire ignited, and the gray-coat man only connected you to Marcus Lane an hour ago when Caleb Ross ran your employment tax file containing your late husband’s Social Security number," Dante realized aloud.
Fourteen minutes later, the black Escalade screeched to a halt in front of my brick walk-up building in Sunnyside, Queens, and Dante and I sprinted up the five flights of narrow wooden stairs while Vincent and two armed security operatives held the street entrance below.
I unlocked the triple deadbolt on my apartment door, ran straight into the tiny bedroom I shared with Sophie, and lifted the carved wooden ballerina music box off the top of my chest of drawers.
When I opened the lid and lifted out the tiny velvet ring tray, Marcus’s fire-blackened silver chain and the flat brass key stamped "403" were still lying right where I had left them twenty-four months ago.
However, as Dante took the brass key between his fingers and held it up to the bedroom window light, his sharp eyes caught something I had never noticed in my grief.
"This is a dual-tooth Swiss vault key manufactured for the Lexington Private Depository on Forty-Eighth Street, just three blocks from my hotel," Dante said softly before tapping the wooden bottom of the music box beneath the velvet tray.
"And the false cedar floor of this music box has been glued down with melted kitchen candle wax," Dante added as he used the tip of his pocketknife to pry up the thin wooden bottom panel of the box.
I gasped out loud as the cedar panel popped free, revealing a small waterproof aluminum foil packet that Marcus himself had sealed inside our daughter’s music box on the afternoon before he went to work for his final shift!
Inside the foil packet lay a tiny black micro-SD memory card and a folded scrap of yellow restaurant receipt paper written in my husband’s hurried, familiar handwriting: "Marissa, if I don’t come home tonight, take this card and the Lexington key to Dante Moretti himself—never trust the police or the hotel managers."
My hands shook violently as tears blurred my vision—for two years the truth had been sitting three feet from my pillow while my husband’s killer walked free!
Dante immediately slid the micro-SD card into the encrypted portable reader attached to his tactical tablet right there on my bedroom dresser.
A thirty-second video file recorded on Marcus’s old cell phone two days before the fire flickered onto the screen, filmed through a crack in the service pantry door of Cena D’Oro’s private upstairs dining room.
Sitting at the corner table in the video was the narrow man in the gray coat with the star-shaped chemical burn scar on his wrist—whom Vincent immediately identified over the car intercom as Arthur Pendelton, a former intelligence demolition contractor Turned cartel cleaner—counting out two hundred thousand dollars in cash across the tablecloth!
Then the camera angle shifted slightly as Marcus zoomed in on the two men sitting across from the arsonist, and I covered my mouth with both hands to stifle a scream.
Sitting beside the gray-coat killer was Caleb Ross—two years before he ever applied to be general manager at The Moretti Reserve—and sitting next to Caleb, shaking the arsonist’s hand and handing him the structural blueprints to both Cena D’Oro and the twelfth floor of Dante’s hotel, was Deputy Mayor Richard Sterling, the corrupt chairman of the New York Harbor Commission and Dante’s fiercest political enemy!
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Before Dante could eject the memory card from the tablet, the heavy steel police cruiser that was supposed to be transporting a handcuffed Caleb Ross to the precinct downtown was suddenly ambushed on Tenth Avenue on Vincent’s live police scanner—sideswiped by an armored black garbage truck that broke Caleb out of custody in less than twenty seconds!
At the exact same instant, the burner phone in Dante’s coat pocket rang with a blocked video call showing Caleb Ross standing inside the wheelhouse of an industrial tugboat at Pier Ninety with Sophie’s small wrist tied to the brass steering wheel—and a tiny red laser dot from a high-powered sniper rifle on the rooftop across my Queens street suddenly painted the center of Dante’s chest through my bedroom window!
