Chapter 7 - THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
The identification card should have been impossible to find.
Dominic Bell had been declared dead after a boating accident more than a decade earlier. His funeral had been attended by members of the Orsini family, and Carmine remembered his father refusing to discuss the details.
Now Dominic's wallet lay in a New Orleans alley.
Benny found a recent receipt tucked behind the identification card. It came from a motel outside the city, dated two days earlier.
Carmine sent a trusted investigator to verify the lead.
Nell insisted on going with him.
"That man knows my family," she said. "If he was involved in the fire, I deserve to hear the truth."
Carmine wanted to refuse.
Then he remembered how often other people had decided what Nell could handle.
"Stay beside me," he said.
The motel manager recognized Dominic from a photograph.
He had rented a room under a different name and paid in cash. He had checked out that morning, leaving behind a small envelope.
Inside was a photograph of a little girl standing outside Fontaine's Bakery.
Nell recognized herself.
She had been six years old.
On the back, someone had written:
The daughter must never learn what happened to her mother.
Nell's knees weakened.
Carmine caught her before she fell.
For a moment, she leaned against him, unable to speak.
Then she straightened.
"Find him."
They tracked Dominic to a fishing cabin near Lake Pontchartrain.
The man who opened the door looked older than his years, with deep lines around his mouth and a scar running down his neck.
He recognized Carmine immediately.
"Anthony's boy."
Carmine stepped inside.
"You were supposed to be dead."
"So were a lot of people who knew too much."
Dominic admitted that he had helped Silas Voss steal money from the bakery. But he insisted he had not started the fire.
He claimed someone else had ordered the attack to destroy evidence of a much larger fraud.
"Who?" Nell demanded.
Dominic looked at her with something resembling pity.
"Your mother's business partner."
"She didn't have another partner."
"She did. A silent investor who controlled the land beneath the bakery."
Dominic reached into a drawer and removed a photograph.
The man standing beside Emmett and Nell's mother wore a familiar gold ring.
Carmine recognized it.
May you like
He had seen that ring on a powerful New Orleans businessman less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Victor Moreau.
