Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Lake Michigan
The mind of Vincent Moretti was built upon logic, mathematics, and the brutal reality of physical evidence. He was not a superstitious man; he did not believe in miracles, and he did not believe in ghosts. In his world, when an engine exploded at fourteen thousand feet, the laws of physics took over, and human flesh was shredded into memory by speed, fire, and freezing water.
He remembered every single second of November fourteenth, three years ago.
He remembered standing in the private hangar at Midway, watching the white Gulfstream IV taxi toward the runway through a freezing autumn drizzle. Anna had been sitting by the window, her blonde hair caught in a simple clip, her hand resting protectively over the gentle swell of her stomach. She had been twelve weeks pregnant with their first child—a boy whose heartbeat Vincent had heard through a clinic doppler just four days prior. The pregnancy had been their private sanctuary, a secret guarded from his capos and his enemies alike. He was sending her to the family’s compound in Naples, Florida, out of reach of the brewing war with the Detroit syndicate.
Twenty-two minutes after takeoff, while climbing through the dense cloud deck over the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the transponder signal had vanished.
The aviation authorities called it an catastrophic decompression caused by a mechanical failure in the auxiliary fuel tanks. Vincent had spent forty million dollars of his own money deploying private salvage fleets, sonar vessels, and commercial divers into the icy, pitch-black depths of the lake for six agonizing months. They had recovered twisted fuselage panels, crushed luggage, and fragments of human remains that were battered beyond recognition.
The federal medical examiner had presented him with a sealed manila envelope containing a dental chart match. The coroner had looked him in the eye and told him, with clinical certainty, that the fragments recovered from the lake floor belonged to Anna Bennett Moretti and that no biological trace of the fetus had survived the impact.
Vincent had organized the funeral himself at Mount Carmel.
He remembered the freezing rain soaking through his black coat, the sound of the priest’s voice droning over the heavy mahogany casket that contained nothing but her favorite silk scarves, a framed sonogram, and an empty silver urn. He had stood before that open vault and sworn an oath of extermination. In the thirty-six months that followed, he had systematically dismantled every rival organization that could have conceivably possessed the technical capability to plant an altitude-sensitive barometric bomb aboard his aircraft. He had ordered executions in broad daylight; he had burned shipping warehouses to the water line; he had become the monster the city feared because without Anna, he had no reason to retain his humanity.
And now, standing beneath the glittering Austrian crystal of the Palmer Pavilion, that entire three-year nightmare was unraveling before his eyes.
The woman in the red gown turned slightly as she navigated around a high marble table adorned with an ice sculpture of a swan. The warm golden light fell directly across the profile of her face.
It was her.
May you like
The delicate, aristocratic arch of her nose; the full, softly sculpted lower lip; the pale, luminous skin that looked as though it had never seen a day of hardship; the high, elegant cheekbones that he had cupped in his rough hands every morning for four years. She was not a memory. She was flesh, bone, and blood, draped in fifty yards of embellished scarlet silk, walking through the elite of Chicago as if she had never spent a single second at the bottom of the lake.
Vincent’s boots struck the marble, his stride long, violent, and purposeful as he began cutting through the crowd.
