Four families maintaining peace through mutual respect and cooperation.
Calabresi. Monti. Ferraza. And of course, Vitale.
They form La Corona, a council that's withstood decades of law enforcement pressure.
What if breaking their trust is the point? I write. What if the goal is for La Corona to implode on itself? But to what purpose? To make it easier to investigate and arrest them individually?
I force myself to consider motives. If someone wanted to destroy La Corona from within, creating suspicion between families would be more effective than arrests.
Let them destroy each other while law enforcement watches from a safe distance.
Clean. Efficient. Ruthless.
I close my eyes, remembering Dom's certainty when he accused the FBI of taking Rocco.
What better way to drive a wedge between families than targeting a child?
A child who straddled two families, the Vitales and Montis.
Two families at odds, one blaming the other of betrayal and murder.
The office begins to fill with morning arrivals. I shut my notebook, sliding it into my purse instead of leaving it in my desk.
"Morning, Ricci," Blackwood calls as he passes my desk. "Progress on Vitale?"
I force a smile. "Working some angles, sir."
For the first time in my career, I don't trust my own people.
I grab my purse and head out, deciding to figure out why Dom thinks my car was the one used to kidnap Rocco.
I slip into the motor pool office, and the clerk barely glances up when I explain I need to cross-reference vehicle usage for a case timeline.
"Knock yourself out," he says, granting me access to the database before returning to his bagel.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, pulling up fleet records from last December.
The Winter Festival where Rocco was taken fell on the 18th. I expand my search to the week before and after, scanning for patterns.
I see my car checked in and marked for service. There’s no record of it leaving again until I picked it up the day I got the call about Rocco.
No cars were checked out, but that doesn’t mean much.
Most agents keep their cars.
While not supposed to be used for personal reasons, we can commute with them.
“Is there a way to see GPS tracking?”
That earns a glance from the clerk. “Are you missing your car?”
My brain scrambles for a good reason to need GPS information. “I just want to verify I’ve got the places and times right on a report I’m writing. My boss is such a stickler for these things.”
He shrugs. “Give me the car info.”
I give him my vin number, license plate, and date of the Winter Festival, December last year.
“Sort of late on that report,” he says as he taps in the information into his computer.
