Chapter 2 - The Phantom in the Archives
The private jet touched down at Northeast Philadelphia Airport at four in the morning.
Laura was not on the plane.
Nicholas had left her at the diner under the watchful eyes of Marco and two heavily armed perimeter guards dispatched from Trenton.
He had refused to bring her to the city.
In Nicholas’s world, an unverified relative was not a blessing.
An unverified relative was an ambush wrapped in sentimentality.
He walked into his penthouse library where his personal physician, Dr. Alan Ward, was already waiting with two sterile coolers.
Dr. Ward had treated Nicholas since his first gunshot wound at twenty-two.
He was discreet, wealthy, and terrified of Nicholas.
"Did you collect the samples yourself?" Dr. Ward asked, adjusting his spectacles.
Nicholas placed two sealed biohazard envelopes on the mahogany desk.
One contained three strands of gray hair pulled from Laura's brush with root follicles intact.
The other contained a cotton swab Nicholas had scraped along the inside of her cheek himself while holding her chin with his leather-gloved fingers.
"I want this run through an independent sequencing lab in Baltimore," Nicholas said.
"No family names."
"No electronic records uploaded to commercial databases."
"You oversee the extraction personally."
"I want the probability ratio on my desk before sunset."
Dr. Ward nodded solemnly, packed the coolers, and left without another question.
Nicholas did not sleep.
He poured two fingers of rye whiskey and sat behind his desk, opening an encrypted laptop.
His chief intelligence broker, a man named Eli who operated out of an unmarked office in Camden, answered on the first ring.
"Boss," Eli said.
"Pull the archives on November twelfth, 1999," Nicholas ordered.
"The traffic collision on Route Nine involving Laura Moretti."
"I want the police incident report, the coroner's certificate, and the transport manifests."
"Give me everything that exists on paper."
It took Eli two hours.
At six-thirty in the morning, the files pinged across the secure line.
Nicholas scrolled through the digitized scans of faded typewritten documents.
The police report was suspiciously brief.
A two-vehicle collision during heavy fog.
A tractor-trailer and a black Mercedes sedan.
The sedan had caught fire.
The remains were described as severely charred and unrecognizable.
The attending coroner who signed the release was Dr. Samuel Grant.
Nicholas stared at the signature.
Dr. Grant had been on Antonio Moretti’s monthly payroll for thirty years.
Grant had owned a beach house in Avalon that Antonio had gifted him for his daughter's wedding.
Grant had died of pancreatic cancer six years ago.
Nicholas picked up his phone and dialed Eli back.
"Eli."
"Yes, Boss?"
"Look at the hospital receiving log from Mercy General for that night."
A keyboard clattered rapidly on the other end.
"I'm looking at it now, Nicholas."
"Read me the admission record for Laura Moretti."
A pause stretched over the line.
One second.
Three seconds.
Five seconds.
"There isn't one," Eli said, his tone shifting into confusion.
"Check the burn unit," Nicholas ordered.
"I checked the burn unit, the morgue log, and the emergency intake ledger," Eli replied.
"There is a burial transit permit issued by the state, but Mercy General has no record of ever receiving a female victim from Route Nine that night."
"The entry jumps straight from a domestic assault case at nine PM to a cardiac arrest at eleven PM."
"The paper trail skips the accident entirely."
Nicholas felt a cold anger igniting in his gut.
"Find Arthur Vance," Nicholas said.
"The funeral director?" Eli asked.
"He retired to a nursing facility outside Cherry Hill," Nicholas said.
"Send two men to bring him to a private room."
"Be polite, but do not give him the option to decline."
By ten in the morning, Nicholas was sitting in a windowless consultation office at the back of an assisted living facility in New Jersey.
Arthur Vance sat opposite him in a wheelchair, trembling beneath a knitted wool blanket.
The old undertaker was eighty-one years old, his skin paper-thin and liver-spotted.
He looked at Nicholas's face and began to weep before Nicholas even spoke.
"I knew this day would come," Vance whispered, his voice trembling.
"Your father promised me that the records were burned."
Nicholas leaned down until his eyes were level with the old man's gaze.
"Tell me about the casket, Arthur."
"Mr. Moretti, please... I had grandchildren."
"Tell me about the mahogany casket you rolled into Saint Mary’s Church twenty-five years ago."
Vance swallowed dryly.
His breathing was shallow and ragged.
"Your father brought the box himself in the back of an unmarked van."
"It was already sealed with industrial screws."
"He paid me fifty thousand dollars in cash to handle the service without opening the lid."
"He said his wife's face had been destroyed by fire and he didn't want the boy to have nightmares."
"Did you open it, Arthur?" Nicholas asked softly.
The silence in the room became suffocating.
"I... I am an undertaker, Nicholas," Vance whimpered.
"I have to balance the weight of the carriage before the pallbearers lift it."
"The box felt wrong."
"It was heavy on the left side and light on the right."
"Late that night, before the viewing, I loosened the bottom screw and used an inspection light."
Nicholas held his breath.
"What was inside?"
"Two sixty-pound iron counterweights from an elevator cable," Vance whispered.
"Wrapped in industrial wool blankets."
"There was no body, Nicholas."
"There was never any body."
Nicholas stood up slowly, adjusted his silk tie, and walked out into the corridor.
His entire childhood grief had been performed in front of an empty box of scrap iron.
His tears, his nightmares, his twenty-five years of placing white roses on a granite headstone—all of it had been staged by his own father.
At three in the afternoon, Dr. Ward called.
"Nicholas," the doctor said, his breath uneven.
"Speak," Nicholas commanded.
"The sequencing is finished."
"The markers are an identical match across all twenty-four primary alleles."
"The probability of maternity is ninety-nine point nine-nine-eight percent."
"The woman in Blackwood is your biological mother."
Nicholas lowered the phone and looked out over the Philadelphia skyline.
His father was dead in the family mausoleum.
May you like
His mother was washing coffee mugs in a roadside diner.
And the family empire was built upon a graveyard of deliberate lies.
