“Your gun was used to kill Bachman. It is registered to you, and your fingerprints are, naturally, all over it.”
“Someone usedmygun to kill the guy? Are youshitting me?”
“I am not,” I said. “You dropped your weapon, and now an enemy has taken advantage of that fact. The task forceisaware that the other kills in Central Park were not from the same gun, but that matters very little to them. The task force also seems to think you have a secret bank account into which several large payments were made the day after each killing. They’ve used that information to tie several other shootings to the same spree.”
Baxter looked green. “I don’t have a secret bank account,” he whispered.
“No,” I said, looking him over. “I don’t suppose you do. And that does seem like somethingsomeonewould have picked up on during all those clearance checks for the FBI.”
“So—”
“Someone’s set you up. Yes.”
“But—who?Who could hate me that much?”
I had to chuckle at that. “Wrong question, kid.Who stands to gainfrom setting you up? Whatever this is, it’s unlikely to be personal. It’ll be business, pure and simple.”
“Business,” he repeated dully. His face looked blank but his eyes stormy.
“Moving on,” I said. “In regards to those task force members who had black spots in their careers. The two ATF officers, as I assumed, worked undercover. One with bikers. The other with a cartel that was working both sides of the border down south. Hate to think whatthatpoor fucker’s seen.”
Baxter gave me a cynical smile that suggested he did not see much difference between the drug cartels and my own line of work. At least it had gotten him to stop thinking about himself.
I continued, “Ethan Villiers used to work psych at Guantanamo back in the aughts. The Government very kindly covered up his work there.” From the look on his face, this was not something Villiers had discussed with Baxter.
“Oh, but that makes sense,” he said after a moment’s thought, as though I’d said it didn’t. He looked at me and I saw, not for the first time, the eager scholar peeking out from the athlete’s body. “Terrorist cells show some similar psychological markers to members of organized crime. They bond through shared values and behaviors, and they lean conservative. They’re also—”
“As I thought, Matthew Walsh worked undercover early in his career as a plant in the Clemenza Family.” Bax had been warming to his theme and I wanted to head off a lecture. “Could be he turned while he was with them.”
“You think he’sstill working for them?” Bax asked disbelievingly. “Come on. Someone would have noticed by now.”
“Possibly,” I allowed. “But it does show a direct link. And now we come to Daniel Kowalski, our NYPD friend. During those unaccounted-for months, he was in rehab. Coke addiction. Nasty one to shake.”
Bax frowned. “Someone could be using it as leverage. Has he relapsed?”
“I have no idea. However, his address is listed in Brooklyn and we’d certainly have more chance watching him unobserved than a police Captain. If nothing else, we could rule Kowalski out.”
Bax dropped his face into his hands. “This is like slapping our hands over a crack in the Hoover Dam,” he said, muffled. “We don’t have the resources we need. We don’t have thetime. And besides all that, he might not be Captain, but Kowalski’s still acop. We’d have the whole of the NYPD down on us in minutes if he made us.” He looked up, face haggard and suddenly much older than his years. “I knowyouthink the cops are useless, but they have advantages. One being their sheer number. Another being their capacity to search this city in a way we can’t. Not to mention—”
“Bax,” I said, and he shut up. “It’s notwe twoagainst the might of the NYPD, FBI, and whoever else was invited to that little party of yours.”
His eyebrows, ruffled and unruly, quirked. “What do you mean?”
“We’ll have Familial help.”
He stood, somehow making that one movement aggressive and sullen. “When did your Family ever help anyone, Messina?”
* * *
We spentthe afternoon silently doing our own research. Baxter was restless, moving between online research and wandering the room with glazed eyes, lips moving, the occasional whisper. Talking to himself. Arguing with himself. I let him go; his process was his process. Now and then he would grab up a pen and write furious, fast notes, or type rapidly into a computer document, but he didn’t share and I didn’t ask.
As for me, I scoured the victim autopsies, the witness statements—few and far between—and thought about every enemy the Morelli clan had made over the years.
I might as well have tried to count grains of sand on a beach.
We ate dinner from cans again, although neither of us finished.
And then we got into bed, where Bax lay stiff and uncomfortable. That night I was the one to turn my back on him, wondering if this was how couples felt when they went to bed angry.
