I force my eyes away from the screen, unnerved by the fact a random woman who I’ve just met has managed to invoke such an unhealthy interest. I stand up and walk toward the large window overlooking the city. Calling Luca Rossi, the Chicago don, would be the best course of action. He’ll send someone to collect her and take her back to Chicago.
“No,” I say, staring at the street below. The rain had begun an hour earlier. It started as drizzle but grew into a full-blown downpour. I wonder how much darker her hair is when it’s wet. “Put someone on her. Do you know where she lives?”
“I checked. Some dump in the suburbs.”
“Alone?”
“She has a cat.”
“I want cameras planted in her place,” I say. “Kitchen, living room, bedrooms, but not in the bathroom.”
Nino says nothing, so I turn to find him regarding me with a slightly shocked expression on his face. We’ve knowneach other for two decades, so it’s no wonder my request stuns him. I’m baffled by it too.
“I had a look inside from the fire escape,” he says quickly. “It’s a two hundred-square-foot studio. Just one room.”
What the hell is a capo’s sister doing, working her ass off as a nurse, living in a studio in the suburbs?
“Put two cameras to cover the whole space,” I say. “I want it done in the next twenty-four hours, and set the recordings to stream directly to my laptop. No one else is to have access.”
“Consider it done.” Nino gets up to leave but looks at me over his shoulder. “If I may ask, where did you unearth her?”
“In front of St. Mary’s. I was going home after a semiannual checkup.” I turn back to the window. “She called me an idiot, almost knocked me over, and then delivered a baby in the middle of a parking lot. She also confiscated my jacket in the course of this escapade.”
Nino bursts out laughing behind me. “Well, I see why you found her interesting.”
Yes. I find Milene Scardoni very interesting.
Chapter 2
I lie back in my bed, power up the laptop, and click through to the surveillance feed from the Scardoni girl’s apartment, as I have done every evening for the past week. The first evening I did it, I told myself it’s just a benign interest, convinced it was just some passing fixation. I would have a quick look, turn off the feed and go to sleep. I ended up watching the whole recording. And I’ve done the same every damn evening since. The need to see her is too strong to ignore.
Backtracking the recording to this morning, when she would have returned from her night shift, I hit enter and play the video.
The place is a goddamned shoebox, and two cameras are enough to cover every inch. I watch Milene as she comes in, almost stumbles over the sleeping cat in the middle of the entranceway, and disappears into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, she comes out, wearing an oversized T-shirt, drags herself to bed, and slides beneath the blanket. She pulls thecorner close in a comforting embrace. Not a minute later, her idiot cat jumps onto the bed. It’s a muddy gray, skinny, and part of its tail seems to be missing. Did she pick it out of a dumpster? The cat prowls toward the foot of the bed, then taps and scratches Milene’s feet, which are poking out from under the covers.
There is no audio, so when Milene springs up off the bed, I can only see her lips move. From the expression on her face, she’s yelling. The cat dashes under the bed. Milene lies back down, but the instant she pulls the blanket up again, the cat returns. It stalks toward Milene’s head, extends its front paw and bats her nose. She doesn’t react, even though the cat touches her a few more times. The damn thing is persistent. Milene reaches out her hand to grab the cat around its middle, hugging it close to her side and buries her face into the pillow.
I zoom in on the video and watch her sleeping form, illuminated by the midday sunlight streaming in through the window. The cat turned around at some point and has its head pressed against Milene’s neck.
Why the hell is she living in that dump? I had Nino check her accounts. Her brother is depositing a huge sum of money every month, but she doesn’t withdraw anything. She only uses her second account, the one where she receives her meager monthly paycheck. I wonder if Scardoni knows she’s in New York. Probably not. I should have called Rossi the moment I found out who she was. Instead, I kept spying on her, night after night, and it became an urge. It’s ridiculous. But I can’t stop.
Trying to ignore the phantom pain in my left foot, I skip the recording ahead to around seven in the evening when Milene startles and sits up in her bed. She stares at the frontdoor for a second, wraps the blanket around herself as she gets out of bed, and heads in the direction of the entrance. She’s halfway there when that stupid cat dashes toward her, grabs the corner of the blanket that’s dragging along the floor, and darts between her legs. Milene stumbles. The cat jumps onto the dresser and pushes a decorative basket onto the floor, along with a stack of papers and other items. Milene regards the mess at her feet, shakes her head, and proceeds toward the door.
A delivery guy holding a huge bouquet of red roses in his arms comes into view. They exchange a few words, then he leaves with the flowers, and Milene heads into the kitchen with some kind of note in her hand. She stops next to the trash can, reads it, and frowns. Rolling her eyes, she throws the note in the garbage.
I take my phone from the nightstand, send a message to Nino instructing him to find out who sent the damn flowers, and resume watching.
I follow Milene as she scrambles some eggs on the stove, drumming my fingers onto the laptop the whole time. Did she send the flowers away because she didn’t like roses? The thought of some other man sending her flowers burns in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it was the color. I grab my phone again and call my secretary. When she takes the call, I let her know what I need. There are a few moments of utter silence before she quickly mumbles she’ll have the florist call me right away. My phone rings five minutes later.
“Mr. Ajello. It’s Diana from the flower boutique. Please let me know what you need, and I’ll arrange everything for you,” she chirps.
“I need flowers to be sent tomorrow morning.”
“Of course. Would you like something specific? We have amazing red roses from the Netherlands and—”
“I’ll take everything you have, except red roses.”
“Oh? All of our roses except the red ones? Absolutely. Where—”
Source: www.allfreenovel.com
