Angelo had tried to persuade me to stay away. Right then, as guilt and mortification flooded through me, I wished I had listened to him.
“Sir, please,” I tried. “You know me. YouknowI didn’t do what they’re saying. And the only reason I haven’t turned myself in yet is because…” I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound like an excuse.
“Because you always think you know better,” Villiers said heavily. “Because you can’t stand to think that you might be wrong about something. And because you’re not, and never have been, a team player.”
I wanted to protest, to tell Villiers how wrong he was to think such things of me. But the words died in my throat. I paused and really thought about it, especially after Angelo’s admission the night before about his own preference for working alone.
When I’d joined the FBI, I’d known I would be a cog in the wider mechanisms of law and order. I’d thought that sounded noble, like my small effort would have an effect on the greater whole. But I wasn’treallyinterested in being a member of a team. I never had been. And after my family had died, I felt even more alone, and I’d grown ever-more self-sufficient as I dreamed grandiose dreams of taking out the Mob Boss who’d killed my family.
So Villiers had a point. In fact, that had been one of the reasons Villiers gave for choosing me for the task force: he’d said he wanted me to get a taste of what it really meant to work in a team.
So far, I hadn’t exactly excelled.
Maybe the real reason I hadn’t turned myself in yet was because I, too, considered myself a lone wolf. But— “If I turn myself in, they’ll focus on me and they won’t find out who’s really doing this.” It wasn’t untrue.
“So even after all this, you still think of yourself as the hero?” The look of disgust on Villiers’ face just about broke my heart. “Stop lying to me, Flynn. They have your gun, your fingerprints, your hairs all over the victim—”
“What? Myhairs? But I wasn’t even anywhere near—” I broke off as Villiers finally revealed the reason he’d gone back to his desk.
He’d managed to distract me long enough to pick up his gun and train it on me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Baxter
“Don’t come any closer,” Villiers said. “And give me one good reason I shouldn’t arrest you right now.”
“You can believe me or not, sir,” I said stiffly. “But the truth is, I want this case solved. And you and I both know that the task force has already decided that I’m the guy they’re looking for, me and Angelo Messina. I guess I can’t blame them; my gun was there because I was stupid enough to drop it when I was tailing Messina through the Park. My hairs—I have no explanation for that, because I wasn’t anywherenearBachman, and if I’d sent you my witness statement like I said I was going to, maybe…maybe things would be different now. But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t killanyone. And I thought you’d know me well enough, sir, to know this isn’t something I would do.”
He crossed to the sofa and sat down—collapsed, really—then after a moment, put down his gun. “No,” he said, and reached for the drink that he’d evidently poured before I got there. “No, I didn’t like to think it was true.” He looked up at me and asked, “So why are you here, Flynn?”
“Because no matter what you think of me personally, I hoped you could put things aside for now and share information.” I handed him a brief documenting what Angelo and I had found out so far. “I thought about taking the full flash drive of information with me that I mention in there,” I said as he started to read, “but I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t think you would’ve trusted me enough to use it on your computer.”
“You got that right.” But as he perused the papers, his expression changed. “Where did you get the intel?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He gave me a hard look. “I can’t use any information from non-official informants, so if that snake Messina—”
“It doesn’tmatterwhere I got it. It’s not intended to be admissible evidence—just something to show you wherenotto bother looking. But it’s like I was saying, like we both thought: this isn’t a Morelli job. And frankly, I don’t thinkanyFamily is involved, at least not at the higher levels.”
Villiers was watching me now closely, his eyes brightening in that intelligent, calculating, inquisitive manner he usually had. “I have not changed my view on the matter of the Morellis. But I haven’t been able to convince Captain Walsh of that fact, and accepting evidence from the Morelli Underboss—”
“Walsh is why I’m here,” I broke in.
Villiers sent me a sharp look. “Walsh?”
“That’s right, Walsh. You always agreed with me that it wasn’t Morelli-ordered, and now the intel that Angelo and I have found—”
“Angelo?” Villiers sneered. “You’re on first-name terms, are you?”
I ignored it and went on. “The intel we found suggests that no one among the New York Families knows who’s doing this. Which got me thinking that maybe it was someone on our side.”
“Not ‘our side’ anymore, Flynn. You’ve revoked any right you had to think of yourself as doing good in this situation.”
Villiers looked like he’d had more than one drink that night already, and he was spoiling for a fight. But this was too important for me to get sidetracked. “Fine. I think it’s someone on the task force.”
“You’re really reaching now, Flynn.”
