I frowned at my uncle. “We're not that bad.”
Dead silence met my statement.
I huffed. “Moving on.”
“So, what does Viggo being like Anton mean?” Sparks asked.
“It means he's a figment of people's imagination, except he might be real,” Sal explained. “After the investigation into Anton was completed, everyone except Lany thought he didn't exist. That it was simply the name people made up to take over the Gambino family and move one of their own people into place. Lany was the only one that thought he really existed, just that he wasn't Carlos's son.”
“Did he exist?”
Agent Crenshaw nodded. “We were able to establish that there was actually someone pretending to be Anton Gambino, but we've never identified who he was.”
My breath caught.
“Lany?” Sal moved closer, his gaze intent. “What is it?”
I slowly turned to look at him. “It's the same guy.”
Sal just stared at me.
The room went dead silent.
“Baby, do you know what you're saying?”
I did, and I didn't. The idea was still forming in my head.
I started pacing as I put words to the thoughts filling my head. “The Fernandez Cartel was trying to get a foothold in the city so that they could move their drugs in. They were hoping to use Anton to take over the Gambino family because Carlos doesn't allow drugs.”
When I reached the end of the room, I turned and started back the other way. Everyone cleared a path for me and just let me walk and talk. I heard frantic typing in the background and knew Lyn was making notes of everything I said.
“When that didn't pan out and the Fernandez Cartel was taken out of the city, Anton was still out there blowing in the wind, except he never went away. He's been slowly building his little drug empire one block at a time. Anton Gambino and Viggo Marcus are just aliases, but I'd bet good money his last name is really Fernandez.”
“Figlio di Troia!”
“You said that already.”
“It bears repeating, Lany.”
Sal stormed up to the storyboard and wrote the two aliases down under Viggo's name and then added Fernandez. He then took a piece of yarn and connected those names to the drug house. He added the Fernandez Cartel in a blank spot and connected another piece of yard from it to the list of Viggo's aliases.
“Lyn,” he called out without looking away from the storyboard.
“Already on it,” Lyn replied.
Jerry smirked as he glanced at Crenshaw and Sparks. “Told you he'd blow this case wide open.”
I was less worried about blowing the case wide open and more worried about it blowing up in my face.
Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.
Chapter Ten
Salvador
One of these days I was going to figure out how Lany did all of this, and then I'd win the Nobel Prize or something just as grand. Even after all of these years, it was still a mystery to me how he did it. I could look at the very same storyboard and never come to the same conclusions as Lany.
I doubted that day would come anytime soon.
