With all the drastic redevelopments to the lower east side that Artemisia was apparently responsible for, I was happy as hell to see the orange brick front of Dom's hadn't changed. Not even a new coat of paint had been slapped on the chipped wooden sign.
Pasticceria Domenico.
Named after his father and his father and likely his. They were the first of many Southern Italian families to settle in the neighborhood about a hundred years back and now were one of only a few who remained.
Before I even opened the door, the smell of fresh pastries and espresso surrounded me. Overhead, the bells chimed in tune with Otello Profazio's voice that sang through the speakers. The morning crowd had already come and gone. Only a few people lined the tables along the windows, no one stood at the coffee bar.
As I walked up to the counter, a woman leaving brushed against my arm.
"Ma scusari."
The lilt of her voice made me twist my head around. Golden blonde hair fell to the middle of her back, sticking out beneath a suede fedora. A velvet sienna dress wrapped her body, beige boots came up to her knees. For less than a second, she glanced back before slipping out onto the main street. Dark sunglasses hid her eyes, the rest of her face shadowed by the wide brim of her hat, but the lingering scent of Chanel made my heart pound.
I was losing my damn mind.
"You gonna order or what?" a teenager behind the counter called out to me.
"Sorry," I mumbled, trying to shake off the chill. "Uh, gimme four cannoli, a couple cornetti with the pistachio cream..." As I tried to focus on the pastries behind the glass counter, the blonde woman's reflection crossed the high street north towards the docks. I spun back around to watch her.
"Lady, I got shit to do," the kid complained, voice cracking. His attitude struck me with an old familiarity.
"Aspetta, babbu," I shushed him, but the woman disappeared behind another building. "Minchia, Mico, you talk to all your old babysitters like that?"
When I turned back around, a smile of recognition spread over his face. "Mac?"
"Kirby McKinley," Dom's voice boomed from a shadow that spanned the width of the back hall. As he emerged, he tore his white apron off and tossed it on a rack behind the counter. A cloud of flour dusted his jet black hair. "You really gonna sneak into my pasticceria and tell my kid off before coming back to say hello first?"
He scooped me into a hug, apologizing for the flour, but I didn't care. It was good to see him. Even long before Artemisia and I became a thing, he always made sure I had something in my stomach before school whether I had the cash or not. Mostly not. From behind the counter, Mico gave me a fist bump. I hadn't seen the kid since he came up to my waist.
"Shit, he grew up fast," I laughed, having to look up at him now.
"Well, you've been abroad for some time," Dom replied. "What's it been, seven—"
"I heard you went to prison and started a lesbian gang," Mico interrupted loudly with a shit-eating grin.
"Stati zitto, ciuccio." Dom pinched his son's arm and shoved him back down the hall into the kitchen.
"I wish, Mico," I laughed. "Shit, what else are people saying?"
"Ignore him. When I prayed to the Madonna for a son, I forgot he'd inevitably become a teenager." Dom turned back to me and reached into the glass cabinet to continue filling my bag with pastries. "How are ya, Kirby? Ya look good. Maybe on the skinny side, but you and Artie were always so..." His eyes darted back down to the case. "Sorry, now I'm the chooch. I don't mean to bring her up, she's just been on my mind a lot lately, what with her show over there. And now seein' you, I forget she's—"
"It's fine. I'm fine, great even." But my shoulders tensed beneath the heavy tote. "Dom, did you see the blonde woman who was just in here? With the hat?"
He nodded. "I haven't spoken to her. She only does mobile orders, maybe worried about her English. But she's one of the cousins, I'm told. Nuts, huh?"
"Yeah..." My eyes wandered out the window again, scanning the street where I had last seen her.
"You sure you're okay, Kirby?" Before I could answer, he turned around and was pouring out a cup of espresso for me. "Three sugars, yeah?"
"Could I get a macchiato to go as well?"
Dom glanced over his shoulder with a knowing smile and slid the espresso my way. "A macchiato, huh?"
Off to my side, the bells above the door chimed. "It's for a friend."
"And how is our Special Agent?" the voice next to me crawled down my back. "Reveling in her big arrest, I assume."
"She is," I replied, taking a sip of espresso without looking up at Pino. Chairs scuffled against the floor and two of the tables cleared out. Behind the counter, Dom kept his back turned as he steamed the milk, creating just enough noise to muffle conversation. "Did you dump her husband's body before calling in the tip?"
Pino rubbed at his silver beard, hiding a grin. "Everyone got what they wanted, Kirby. Grazzi a tia."
"Thanks to me?"
"Your mother—her family is from Northern Ireland, right? And your father's one of the Cernuto boys?"
I reeled back at the mention of my unknown, deadbeat dad. "Your guess is as good as mine."
He slid a leather bound booklet in front of me. "I had the yacht in Favignana transferred to your name. Your new one, at least." As Dom turned back around with the macchiato, Pino greeted him with a bright smile. "Salutamu."
"Hey Joe, the usual?"
"Just two sfogliatelle, please. For Sabina. She flies home tonight."
I couldn't hold back as I took another sip of my coffee. "Did you tell her that her son is in the hospital after almost being turned into a not-so-living painting of her dead daughter's art?"
"Why make her worry for nothing?" Pino mused. "Rafaello is fine. Sometimes it's best to keep the little wife out of it. I know you know this too." Out of the corner of my eye, I caught him peeking into my tote. As I shrugged my shoulder away, he chuckled. "Cu nasci tunnu nun po moriri quatratu." He slid a crisp hundred dollar bill over the glass bar. "Grazzi, Dom." Leaning far too close into me, he grabbed his bag from the counter and whispered, "Luca will be waiting for you in Catania. Ni videmu."
I waited until he left before looking at the booklet. I already knew what it was, but I flipped the first page open and sighed into my last sip of espresso. "He could've at least let me pick my own photo," I mumbled, looking over the passport. "Dom, was he calling me boring? I heard something about dying a square?"
Dom shook his head as he handed me my bag of pastries. "It's an old saying. Someone born a circle cannot die a square."
"Once a thief, always a thief," I murmured, lowering the heavy tote to my elbow. Carefully, I tucked the passport inside and placed the pastries on top of the bronzes, adjusting it back on my shoulder to grab Desirae's macchiato.
"For what it's worth, I don't believe it to be true."
I nodded. "Thanks, Dom."
"Stay outta trouble, Kirby."
My lips pressed firmly together, but I forced them up to a smile before leaving.
Outside, the clouds had continued to darken the skies, the northern wind had picked up. A storm was coming in over the bay and already, it smelled like rain. I jogged across the street and rounded the corner, nearly passing the back of the museum, but stopped when I saw Carl, the security guard, sitting on his bench having a cigarette behind the yellow tape.
"Morning, Carl," I called out.
He looked my way and gave me a nod.
"I'm Desirae's fr—"
"I saw your ankle the other night. I know who you are." He opened the pack of cigarettes and shook them my way.
"Oh? No thanks, I'm trying to quit."
His lips curled up to a smirk around his cigarette, but his bushy brows remained furrowed. "Me too."
"You been here all night?"
"Someone's gotta look after her work."
"Artemisia?"
With a sigh, he breathed out a cloud of smoke. "She was always good to me, gave me a job when no one else would. I feel like I let her down. At least, I thought I did."
Artie did always try to do what was right by people even if she didn't go about it the right way. With the reputation the Cassini's had built, it was easy to forget the good things they all did for the community; for businesses like Dom's, people like Carl, families who needed protection. Single mothers, especially. I knew that to be true.
"Well, if you didn't hear, the FBI arrested the killer last night," I tried to assure him. "It was Landon."
"FBI, huh?" Carl laughed softly to himself as he raised the cigarette to his lips again. He took a long, final drag and exhaled it even slower. Blue smoke snaked around his nose. "She's a smart one."
"Desirae?"
Flicking the cigarette to the sidewalk, he stamped out the red ember with his toe and stood up, walking my way instead of back to the museum. "Tell her I said 'hey,' would ya?" He ducked under the yellow tape and handed me the rest of his pack, white lighter tucked in the plastic. Without another word, he continued down the sidewalk, opposite of me.
The sky began to spit cold pellets of rain down my back, sending a chill through me inside and out. I hugged Desirae's sweatshirt tighter around my sides, slipping the cigarettes into the bag, and then hurried down the next couple blocks back to her apartment building.
As I walked through her door, soft fur slinked against my shins, in and out between my feet. "What? Didn't she feed you, Colonel?"
"Don't let him fool you," Desirae called out from the bedroom. "He definitely ate."
I kicked off my shoes and headed down the hall with the tote full of pastries and her coffee. Seeing Desirae still in her robe squashed any lingering tension from my morning outing. I set the drink down on her nightstand and practically tossed the tote at the end of the bed. Her legs parted for me as I climbed in with her.
"You were gone for a while," she said against my lips. "I was starting to get worried."
"I was just shooting the shit with Dom. Why were you worried?"
"Did you think any more about my offer?" she asked, dodging my question.
"Did you think any more about mine?"
Her locs fell off to the side of her neck as she tipped her head with playful annoyance. I unwrapped a cornetto and held it up to her mouth, watching as she took a bite of the flaky pastry.
"You are making me break all of my rules," she murmured through a mouthful.
"But it's worth it, isn't it?"
She didn't answer, but she didn't need to either. I could see it in her eyes with how she looked at me. Taking the cornetto from my hand, she took another bite.
"Speaking of breaking the rules, I may have made a quick stop at the museum."
Desirae stopped chewing and sat up a little straighter. "For what?"
Carefully, I lifted one of the cast cats out and unwrapped it. Her eyes widened as the pastry lowered to her lap.
"Kirby. Tell me that's not what I think it is."
"What? It's a cat."
"Yes, but whose bronze cat is it?"
"Well, not Landon's anymore. But I guess it never really was, right? And technically, this one's actually brass. The other one is bronze.
"The other one?"
"Guess the cat's outta the bag now?"
Her eyes shut as she took a deep breath. "We have protocols for this. Landon is in custody. We could've handled this the proper way, going through the right channels with lawyers and contracts."
"And how long would that have taken?" I unwrapped a cannolo and shoved half of it in my mouth. "I just thought we could take a little detour through Nigeria, maybe crash at your mom's for a weekend—"
"My mother's? Oh, great idea."
"—and repatriate the cats on our way to Sicily."
"Well, I'm glad you clearly thought all this through." She was being sarcastic, but I could see a hint of a smile on her lips. "What am I going to do with you?"
I shrugged and traced my fingers over her ankle. Colonel Mustard saw the movement and jumped up to pounce. I wiggled my hand beneath the sheets to play with him, surprised by how agile he was despite his potato shape.
"You know, I used to let him outside," Desirae said quietly. Her eyes shifted from the bronze cat over to me and Colonel Mustard. "He was a lot thinner then. Definitely in better shape. But he kept bringing me home dead animals."
The way she paused at the end of her statement made it seem like she was trying to tell me something. "Are you saying you wanna turn me into your chubby little housecat?"
"The opposite..."
I looked up to meet her dark eyes.
"I can't go with you to Sicily."
"I know," I sighed. "I figured I could just surrender the bronzes over to your Art Crime team when we get to DC."
"Kirby, I don't think—"
From inside my pocket, my phone buzzed and chimed with a text message. I pulled it out and slid it open.
"When did you get your phone back?"
"Pino returned it to me yesterday. I assume he went to visit Cal and had one of his guys..." As I opened my messages, a photo from an unknown number popped up. It showed the inside of a jail cell where a prone body laid crumpled on the floor with a rope of white sheet around its neck. The text just said: your welcome.
"What is it?" Desirae asked.
I held my phone out to her. "Landon's dead."
As she snatched it from my hands, her own began to ring, but she ignored it. Her eyes darted over the image. "Calogero?"
"Who knows. Pino has guys everywhere. But good riddance." As I dug into the tote for another pastry, the showcard from Artemisia's retrospective fell out. "I still don't get why he picked us to target? These paintings weren't even finished. If Artie knew they were hanging on the front of the museum, she'd—"
"Rise up from the grave," Desirae murmured. She snapped my phone closed and handed it back to me.
"Except, she apparently donated her body to one of those predatory body trading companies you were telling me about. Ironic, I guess that she was running one of her own."
"This was the plan all along." Desirae sprung up from the bed, feet pounding across the floor and down the hall. "They set him up."
"What?" I stood up to follow her, but she was already coming back to the bedroom, pushing past me with a folder stuffed with papers in her hand. "What's going on?"
"Everything kept coming back to you," Desirae said as she dropped to the bed.
She flipped open the folder and papers spilled out. But not just papers, photographs as well. The same ones Landon had shoved in my face, the same ones Rafael had thrown at me. My blood stained their edges. I picked them up, finding even more that I hadn't seen taken over the year I had spent with Artie, hiding out in Favignana.
"Des, I—I don't understand. Where did you get these from?"
As she looked up from copies of the greenhouse receipts, her eyes met mine. Guilt wrinkled her brow. "An investigator."
"An investigator? So you knew who I was this whole time?"
"Kirby, can you sit please?" Desirae pleaded, but I felt frozen in place. "I think they used the retrospective to lure you back home. At first, I thought they were just after the stolen artwork or the money and that might have been part of it, but then the tableaus completely threw me. Yet, it all still kept coming back to you."
I couldn't make sense of anything Desirae was saying. I couldn't get over the fact that she had known who I was.
"I kept thinking you were the target," she continued, "but you were just the bait."
"Bait? For what?"
"I wasn't just looking into Landon and the museum's finances being tied to the mafia." She set the receipts down and flipped through a few pages, then handed a paper up to me. "I was also looking into Artemisia."
My eyes scanned the document, translating what I could from Italian. Sweat began to dampen my palms. It was Artie's death certificate. Another secret Desirae had kept from me.
"There were inconsistencies with Landon's new body donation program. It was established weeks before Artemisia's death—the circumstances of which were already peculiar. An internationally successful young artist kills herself after one of her biggest openings?"
"You didn't know her." Waving Desirae off, I looked back over the document. "She wasn't well."
"You're right. She wasn't well. She was looking to escape, right? Two fake passports along with her real one were found in the villa. I looked further into her death and found even more inconsistencies there. Two emergency calls from two separate panicked women finding the same body?"
My chest tightened as images of Artemisia flashed through my head.
"Bruises on her neck, skin under her fingernails. Ketamine in her system, but the body was never tagged properly."
"What are you saying, Des?" I dry-swallowed a new implication. "You think she was murdered?"
"Kirby..." Desirae held onto my name for what seemed like forever. "It wasn't her body. She's still alive."