Page 78 of The Hidden Heir

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Reece gasps.

Victor nods. “Our thoughts exactly.”

“Wait, hold on. What got you on to this in the first place? I thought you buried your man. There was a funeral service, the whole nine yards.”

“As you’re aware, the Petruccis were recently targeted in a series of attacks,” Victor replies. “The kind of privileged information the assailants had access to could only have been provided by a handful of people, one of them, presumed dead.”

“Stefano Petrucci…”

“Yes. And the other individuals whom we’d otherwise suspect simply have no reason or backbone to do such a thing,” Victor adds. “I don’t know, perhaps a hunch drove me closer to this avenue, as well. But obviously, we weren’t wrong. Not entirely, anyway.”

“So you’re telling me the dead guy who got blown up in the middle of a nightclub wasn’t Stefano Petrucci.”

“The body you recovered definitely wasn’t his. We’re wondering about the other victims. There was collateral damage that night.”

Reece offers a slight nod and pulls out a list. “Yes. Six dead, but they were all identified and claimed by their next of kin. Two of your security detail, Landon Kane and Joseph Keller, were among them. The other four were a bartender who worked at the venue, a waitress, and two other patrons who were close enough to the bomb when it went off. There were also ten injured, some severely. Maimed for life, might I add.”

“Just awful,” I whisper.

Reece looks at me. “For all intents and purposes, we treated this as a mob hit. Someone else always gets hurt in these things, Mrs. Petrucci. And we were certain the intended target was Mr. Petrucci. According to the CCTV footage, he was at the center of it.”

“Do you have any footage from the blast site?” Victor asks.

“No. Just different angles. There wasn’t a camera pointed directly at that booth, I’m afraid. We could see parts of the blast on the rest of the footage, but no direct view,” Reece says. He takes a moment to think about it, flipping through the pages again. “You know, I always wondered… I mean, I always suspected this was Mauro Mancuso’s doing, but I could never get close enough to prove it. We were aware of the strife between your families, and there was plenty of street chatter for us to go on. But never anything concrete. Merely circumstantial.”

The more I think about all this, however, the less sense any of it makes.

In my mind, I go over the handful of memories I have of Stefano. Ours was a fling, no matter how badly I wanted it to be more. Whatever desire I had for this man died the moment I realized I would have to bring my baby into the world and raise him on my own.

To give him the love of both parents, because Michael deserves it.

Yet everything I thought I knew about Stefano, even the bad parts, seems to barely scratch the surface.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I tell Detective Reece. “If the man who died isn’t Stefano Petrucci, who was he?”

Reece shrugs. “I suppose we’ll find out once the exhumation order comes through. I’ll ask our captain to send a memo to Judge Hennessy, as well, to document this new discovery. DNA testing should provide us with new information, assuming there’s matching data in CODIS. Otherwise, we’ll need the chief medical examiner to do a second autopsy.”

“Dr. Cooper will handle it himself, surely,” Victor says. “And I know he’ll bring in one of the country’s top forensic anthropologists to assist him. In fact, I’ll make sure of it.”

“Let me guess. Tennis buddy or cigar buddy?” I reply with a dry smile.

Victor winks. “Gym buddy, actually.”

“Of course.” I shift my focus to the kind Detective Reece. “Stefano was definitely at the nightclub, though, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. We’ve got him on CCTV plenty of times and wearing the same clothes. We do lose him in the back room for about five minutes. And the footage is quite grainy at that angle, mainly because of the poor lighting.”

“What’s in the back room?” Victor asks.

“A space designed for private dances. The girls would take their top-paying customers in there to do a lot more than what they did in public.”

“You’ve got Stefano Petrucci going into the back with one of the girls, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Ellison. We interviewed every club employee that night, including the dancers. And she confirmed she went in with Mr. Petrucci, did her thing, got paid, and then both of them came out. Five minutes later, the explosion occurred.”

Victor takes a few seconds, carefully analyzing the information. “Is there a blueprint of the building available?”

“Yes, right here,” Reece says and slides a photocopy across the table. “We were trying to figure out how the bomber got in and out completely undetected.”