“Wasn’t it my mess when I wanted to call the police a few hours ago? Now you’re going to try and get arrested?”

“I’m not going to get arrested. I just want to trip an alarm. Let me just look around.”

She walked up to a French door on the ground floor and cupped her hands around her eyes, peering inside. The moment her hands touched the glass, a shriek screamed through the night, louder than any cheering shouts from the soccer fans.

“Maggie!” I yelled.

She leapt back over the wall and trotted down the street to me, an Oh, shit, did I just do that? look on her face.

I peered up and down the street as the alarm screeched. “Should we go?” I yelled at Maggie, who looked as if she might have changed her mind.

But she only shook her head. “What thieves would stand here and wait for the cops?” she shouted back at me. “And we’re not going to tell them about your dad.”

An image of him lying in that blood hit me, made not just my stomach but my whole internal body constrict with pain.

A police car zipped up the street and parked outside the palazzo. Two carabinieri got out. They didn’t look particularly alarmed by the alarm. Maybe they were used to false ones.

Maggie and I tried speaking to them in the little Italian we knew, but it was useless. One of them said something into his radio, squinting at me above it, and something in his look made me nervous. I’d had more than enough experience lately with suspicious cops, and the reminder sent a shot of terror to my brain.

But just then the front door of the palazzo opened. Elena stood there. One of the carabinieri approached her. They had a quick conversation in italiano. From what I could make out, she was saying, “They are fine. They are with the galleria.”

She gave me a long look and spoke a few more words to the police. The one who seemed to be in charge finally shrugged, nodded and gestured for the other officer to leave with him.

Elena waited until they got in the car. She waited until they pulled away. She gave me a stern, sad look. Her eyes were red, and there were swaths of dark skin below them.

She glanced at Maggie, then back to me. “Come,” she said. “Come in.”

Inside, the galleria was mostly dark, lit eerily with red security lights dotting the exits. We followed Elena through the grand hall. Maggie swiveled her head as we walked, squinting at the artwork, at the gold, at the frescoed ceiling three stories up, murmuring, “Jesus, this is unbelievable.”

Elena said nothing. She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on this afternoon on the train-taupe linen slacks and a matching jacket. But the linen was sagging and creased. She kept clenching her hands into tight fists.

When we got to Princess Isabelle’s apartments, Maggie made more murmurs of appreciation. The door to Elena’s office was already open, sending a block of light into the apartment. She stopped and gestured for Maggie and me to step inside. Once there, she slid the door closed and waved her hand at the light blue chairs under the windows. Silently, Maggie and I sat there, while Elena took a seat behind her marble table-desk.

Maggie looked at me as if to say, You want me to try and talk to her or do you have it?

I shook my head and looked at Elena. She had clearly been crying. She pursed her mouth together now, as if stopping more cries from erupting.

“What happened to him?” I said gently.

“He was killed. Apparently. I cannot believe it.”

“By who?”

Elena swallowed hard. Her eyes looked too wide. The whites surrounding her irises were too thick, frozen in shock.

“Elena, are you okay?” I asked.

“Of course.” Her voice was automated, her eyes alarmed yet vacant.

I was on the edge, near crying for the dad I’d almost had. But seeing Elena, I was reminded that she was the one who’d grown up with him. She was the one who’d known him so long, for her whole life, even when the rest of us didn’t know he had a life. For her this had to be so, so, so much worse. I couldn’t fathom it.

My phone rang as we sat there but I just stared at Elena, not knowing what to say or do. I’d thought, somehow, that once I found her, she would be the one to fill in the blanks, the one to make the next action happen.

But nothing was happening except the faint sounds of horns and occasional sirens from outside.

My phone rang again. Then again. I opened my purse and glanced at it.

The call log read Mom three times.

My mother was not a call-three-times-in-a-row kind of girl, especially when I’d just spoken to her. I narrowed my eyes and looked at the screen. And then she called again.

“Izzy,” she said when I answered. Her voice was breathless. “It’s Charlie. He’s disappeared. He’s…he’s been kidnapped.”

“Charlie has been kidnapped?” I asked.

The words hit the room like a small bomb. Elena, whose eyes had been staring blankly, suddenly came to life.

Maggie’s mouth fell open, and she stared at me. Then she nodded at the phone. “Let us hear this.”

I put the phone on speaker. “Mom, tell me what’s happened.”

“He was at work. Some men were outside. They were doing something outside. They saw the men. They told Charlie to go. He went outside…” My mother, always calm even in the most stressful and tragic situations, was running at the mouth.

I heard voices in the background, then one of them, a woman’s voice, said, “Give me that. Izzy,” I heard then, “it’s Bunny.”

Bunny Loveland was my family’s housekeeper when we first moved to Chicago. Upon finding herself a suddenly single mom, my mother hired her, thinking, apparently, that since Bunny looked like a grandmother she would probably act like one. But this book would not be judged by its cover. Bunny was about as sour as they came, but the thing was, she was honest as hell, a trait I’d come to appreciate, even if her opinions usually felt like a punch to the throat. And eventually Bunny grew protective of us. The last time I’d seen her was a few months ago when I found her outside my condo smacking around some journalists who were hounding me.

“Bunny, what’s going on?”

“I heard about Charlie on the radio. So I came right to the house. Your mother is having a rough time.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re there.”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, here’s all we know. There were two rowdy assholes-” Bunny did not share my goal of trying to stop swearing “-and they were fucking around outside the station. Your brother was sent out to calm ’em down.”

“Who where they?”

“Apparently, they were Cubs fans. Idiots.” Bunny didn’t partake in the Sox versus Cubs debate that split apart the Chicago population. She thought they both “sucked tomatoes,” whatever that meant. “Or they were dressed like Cubs fans,” she said. “One had a tattoo on his neck that was a red letter A or some crap. It was that guy who grabbed Charlie around the neck and hauled him away. If I find that fucker, I’m going to-”

“A tattoo on his neck?” I thought of Ransom, chasing me through the Nature Museum. In that moment, my concerns and questions about my father disappeared. All I cared about was Charlie. “Do we know anything about where they took him?”

“Nope,” Bunny said. “All we know is he was working, he was asked to go outside and then they snatched him. No sign of him since.” There was a faint beeping sound. “Izzy, they’re getting another call. Might be those idiot cops. We’ll call you back.”

She hung up.

I sat staring at my phone. I looked up at Elena. Her eyes were narrowed, confused.

I looked at Maggie, stunned. “That guy who chased me through the museum with Dez Romano-his name was Ransom, and he had a tattoo on his neck. A red letter A with a circle around it.”