Playing Dead Read Free Page B

yet to reveal its secrets, and my heart sank because I knew he was right: I would need him.
    Wade turned with his hand on the doorknob.
    “Tommie, you’re going about this dead wrong. But I will say, it’s nice to see a little fire in you. I thought that side of beef stomped it out of you for good.” His face softened. “I hear you’re still wicked on top of a horse. Maybe we should take a ride and works things out.”
    He shut the door quietly.
    My eyes roved over the walls, tears gradually softening the edges of the cattle drivers and whores and gamblers, historic photographs of Hell’s Half Acre that Daddy picked up one at a time out of dusty boxes in antique shops.
    I stopped at the picture of Etta Place, the beautiful, unfathomable girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. Nailed in a place of honor over the doorframe, one of Daddy’s favorite pictures, a Christmas gift from Mama pulled out of a shiny silver box.
    Long, dark hair piled up, gray eyes, a slim, lithe body. Etta didn’t look wild or cruel but they swore she was.
    Why did no one know her real name? Was she really a prostitute when she met the Sundance Kid? And where did she vanish to? How do you live a life without a beginning and an end?
    As a child, I would sit cross-legged on the hard floor directly in front of her, craning my neck up, willing Etta to speak, to spill her secrets just to me, until Daddy finally glanced over from his desk and said:
    “She’s a mystery, honey. A goddamn mystery.”

CHAPTER 3

    F ive minutes after Wade left, I decided to turn the page and allow the plucky, foolish heroine to plunge ahead.
    I wondered what it meant that I was now thinking idiotically of myself in the third person and using words like
plucky
. My colleagues would offer up the fancy term
disassociating
. Sadie would say
not wanting to deal
.
    Rosalina Marchetti could be a con woman, I told myself. Or a stalker. Emotionally unbalanced. Dangerous.
    I had to know
.
    My fingers leapt over the keys of Daddy’s computer, suddenly alive after a week of crippled hesitation. It took just thirteen minutes before I found the right Rosalina Marchetti in the
Chicago Tribune
archive. And, when I say right, I mean wrong, so wrong.
    Rosalina Marchetti née Rosie Lopez, more poetically known in her stripper days as Rose Red, married Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti on January 27, 1980. A month after that, Marchetti stood before a judge and received a life sentence, convicted on six counts of first-degree murder and unrelated charges of embezzlement and bribery. The sentence seemed light. Anthony Marchetti belonged in hell. He’d viciously murdered an FBIagent, his wife, three children, and an agent guarding them at a safe house. But the court left a chance for parole.
    Marchetti stared coolly out of his wedding announcement, a dark and charismatic stereotype. He looked as if he would be equally comfortable attending the opera or chopping off body parts in a back room. The glowing woman is usually the star of these kinds of photos, but his new bride, Rose, hung back shyly, her face in shadow. It was ridiculous to think that either of these people had anything to do with me.
    Their melodrama didn’t end there. A little more searching confirmed that Rosalina’s story held up. She’d given birth to an unlucky little girl six months later. I say unlucky because the child was kidnapped three days after her first birthday. My stomach hurt as I kept reading, one of the “hot reads” on a true crime site with 136,000 hits. Days after the abduction, the kidnapper had sent Rosalina her daughter’s finger. I looked down to confirm that my fingers were still attached. Why didn’t Rosalina ask about the finger in her letter?
    Details were scarce after that. I fought off another little chill after finding the girl’s name—Adriana Rose Marchetti—still active on the FBI’s missing persons list. She’d never been found.
    Rose Red now lived in a lavish, gated Italian-style villa