Chapter 1 - The Name of the Hound
The marble foyer of the DeLuca estate had been constructed from imported Carrera stone, veined with gray streaks that resembled frozen lightning. It was fifty feet from the double mahogany entrance doors to the sweeping split staircase, and every foot of it had been polished to a mirror shine that reflected the cold, white light of a crystal chandelier.
Julian DeLuca stood in the center of the hall, clad in a hand-tailored three-piece black suit, black silk tie, and a shirt as dark as carbon. His jaw was lined with four days of unshaven stubble, his dark eyes hollowed by the kind of grief that did not weep, but burned inward until the bones felt brittle. Behind him, spaced along the sweeping curve of the stairs like chess pieces, stood five men in identical dark wool overcoats—private security details whose presence had become permanent since the funeral sixty days ago.
Before him, kneeling on the cold floor, was Teresa. She wore the modest black dress and starched white collar of the junior domestic staff, her brown hair pulled back with a ruffled headband. Her hands, trembling slightly, were wrapped around the small waist of three-year-old Mia.
Mia wore a simple white cotton dress. Her blonde curls bounced as she lifted her small right arm, her chubby index finger pointing directly past Julian’s hip toward the tall, arched windows that overlooked the northern estate road.
"My wife died two months ago," Julian said. His voice did not carry anger; it was a flat, dead iron plate that crushed the space between them. "Her car went off the bluffs at Oyster Bay. Her casket was buried in the family plot with eighty witnesses. Do not bring parlor games into this foyer, Teresa."
"I am not playing, sir," Teresa whispered, her voice hitching as she looked up into the terrifying stillness of his face. "I took Mia to the apothecary by the central depot to fetch her bronchial syrup. While we were waiting on the platform, she pulled on my sleeve. She pointed toward the commuter train."
"You saw someone who looked like her," Julian replied, not blinking. "Grief makes people see ghosts in crowded terminals."
"No," Mia piped up. Her child’s voice was high, flute-like, and piercingly clean against the sterile hush of the marble. "Not a ghost. Mama. And Bruno was with her."
Julian’s breath caught in his throat with the physical violence of a fishhook.
The men on the staircase did not move, but the air in the foyer suddenly dropped ten degrees.
"Bruno..." Julian muttered, the word barely a rasp of air across dry vocal cords.
Bruno had not been in the car at Oyster Bay. Bruno was a ninety-pound Italian cane corso—a guard dog with a clipped left ear and a silver identification tag stamped with the family crest. When the divers pulled the wreckage of Katherine DeLuca’s Mercedes from the forty-foot depths of the bay, the dog had vanished. The police assumed the animal had leaped through the shattered window before impact and drowned in the rip tides of Long Island Sound.
Julian had never released that detail to the press. The loss of Katherine had dominated the national business pages for three weeks, but the missing dog was an internal family memorandum known only to Julian, his lead investigator, and his late brother-in-law, Vincent.
A three-year-old girl could not invent the name of a drowned dog.
Teresa saw the sudden, terrible fracture in his face and pulled Mia tighter against her apron, terrified she had provoked a monster. "Please, Mr. DeLuca... she's just a child. She doesn't know what she’s saying—"
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"Teresa," Julian interrupted, his voice dropping into a register so quiet that the security guards on the landing leaned forward to catch it. "Which platform?"
"The... the outbound local," Teresa stammered, tears spilling onto her white collar. "Track four. The train to Beacon."
