Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Boston
The vault wasn't under the house; it was buried thirty feet beneath the detached three-car garage, accessible only by a hydraulic elevator that required a biometric scan and a six-digit rolling code. It was where I kept our non-digital files, paper deeds, untraceable currency, and cold-case intelligence on the rival syndicates operating out of Chicago and New York.
Dominic was sitting at a heavy wooden table under a single halogen light, surrounded by yellowed manila folders. A high-speed satellite modem hummed in the corner, bypassing our estate's standard network entirely.
"What did you find?" I asked, stepping off the elevator.
"Clara Hayes isn't lying about her mother," Dominic said, sliding a printout across the table. "Eleanor Hayes. Died three years ago in a state facility outside Boston. Multiple sclerosis complications. The medical bills swallowed everything they owned."
I looked at the hospital records. The signatures matched. The timeline fit the two-year gap in her employment history.
"So she's legitimate?" I asked.
"Her background is real, Vincent," Dominic said, leaning forward and tapping a secondary document with his thick forefinger. "But her arrival here isn't random."
I frowned, pulling the second paper toward me. It was a encrypted wire transfer ledger from a private bank in Zurich.
"Explain," I ordered.
"Clara Hayes was broke six weeks ago," Dominic said. "Facing eviction from her basement apartment in South Boston. Then, twenty-four hours before she submitted her application to the agency you use for Matteo, an anonymous account based out of the Cayman Islands deposited ninety thousand dollars into an escrow account registered in her name."
The blood in my veins turned to ice. "Ninety thousand?"
"And that's not the worst part," Dominic continued, his voice dropping into a low, somber tone. "I tracked the routing origin of that Zurich transfer. It didn't come from the Moretti family. It didn't come from the Russians in New York."
"Who did it come from?"
Dominic looked me straight in the eye. "It came from a holding company called Valerie Holdings LLC."
The room seemed to lose all its oxygen.
Valerie.
My late wife. The woman who had been blown to pieces fourteen months ago in my armored SUV.
"That's impossible," I whispered, my voice sounding flat, detached from my body. "Valerie’s accounts were liquidated and moved into Matteo’s trust fund eleven months ago. I personally authorized the probate filings."
"Someone cleared a secondary, off-books trust three weeks ago using Valerie’s private biometric key," Dominic said softly. "Vincent... the person who paid Clara Hayes to come into this house used your dead wife's credentials to do it."
I leaned against the heavy oak table, my mind racing through a labyrinth of terrifying possibilities.
Either Valerie had created a contingency protocol before her death—paying a specialized caretaker to find Matteo if something happened to her—or my wife wasn't dead at all. Or worse: someone who helped murder her had stolen her identity to place a handler inside my home, right next to my helpless son.
"Where is Clara right now?" I asked, my hand dropping to the heavy frame of the Kimber .45 holstered beneath my left arm.
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"She’s in Matteo’s room," Dominic replied, checking his wrist monitor. "She went back in ten minutes ago with a book."
"Lock down the estate," I commanded, my eyes burning with a dark, cold fire. "Nobody enters. Nobody leaves. Cut the external comms. I'm going to find out whose payroll Clara Hayes is really on."
