The coffee was hot. Steam still rose from it. Greco had been dead a very short time.
Alessandro Castellani’s words from last night came back to me.A goodbye present to you and Messina.And Greco’s recounting of the killer’s words:Tell Angelo I hope he likes his present.
No.
It just didn’tfit, psychologically. Alessandro wouldn’t kill with poison, I was sure of it. He’d do exactly what he’d told me he wanted to do, and gut Greco with a knife. But there was no time to think it through, no time to photograph the scene.
Like Angelo had said, we needed to ghost.
We raced back to the car where a thunder-faced Jack was waiting. The car swerved onto the road as he drove away from the safe house, and Angelo and I were thrown around inside before we could put our seat belts on.
My mind was spinning, and I couldn’t answer Jack’s demands about what had happened. “The coffee,” I said vaguely. “Someone poisoned his…”
Then it hit me. Whatever poison it was, it had been in thecoffee.
Angelo Messina’s one weakness.
There was no telling how long the coffee grounds had been there in the larder. And Castellani had been almost overbearing in his encouragement for us to use his safe house while we were in LA.
Had the poison been meant not for Greco, but for Angelo?
Chapter Eighteen
Jack got onto the freeway as soon as he could, staying just under the speed limit, keeping to the slow lane.
“There’s no need for that,” he said calmly.
I pulled out of my own thoughts and looked down to see Angelo holding a gun on Jack. “You’re going to take us to Castellani’s house,” Angelo said. His tone raised goosebumps on my arms.
“Damn straight,” Jack said. “That’s where I’m headed. Feel free tonotshoot me on the way.”
I didn’t think Jack had done this. I didn’t think it was possible, and it wasn’t his style. I’d looked up the Vegas hits attributed to him by law enforcement, and they’d been standard double-taps. Classic mob hits.
Not these strange, ghoulish killings. If it weren’t for the same sadistic sense of humor behind each of them, I might even doubt that they were the work of the same person. But each of these killings had a common thread, a fiendish delight and a drive to display the victims in a way that suggested either dangerously low levels of empathy, or dangerously high contempt.
A frozen corpse in the desert, with a heart-shaped mark in the dirt.
A heart-shaped arrangement of bloody bodies around a terrorized mobster.
Hearts…
And then poison in the one item someone could reasonably foresee Angelo Messina using in the safe house.
I leaned forward. “If this happened on your Boss’s orders, I’ll kill him myself,” I told Jack. Angelo’s gaze, which had been fixed on Jack, flicked to me for just a moment. “There was poison in the coffee, Jacopo,” I continued. “Maybe the target was Angelo. Not Greco. What do you think?”
Jack gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “Castellani’s no fool,” he said. “He wouldn’t try to cross you guys. It’d bring down the whole fury of the Morellis if he tried something like that, and he knows it.” His eyes met mine in the mirror. “So guess again, Flynn. What else you got?”
It was a strange challenge but it got me thinking. “He’s not wrong,” I told Angelo slowly. “Disappearing us would only cause Castellani problems and there’s no money to be made in it, unless someone else has offered him a lot of cash to make us go away. Sonny Vegas?”
“Sonny knows better than that,” Angelo said after a moment. He kept the gun pressed against Jack’s side, but I could see now that it was just a precaution. Angelo didn’t think Jack was involved in this any more than I did.
“The dregs of the Clemenzas?” I tried. It was a wild guess, and Angelo didn’t even bother shaking his head.
Instead, he asked, “Doyouhave something you’d like to contribute, Jacopo?”
“I got nothing, except that I’m on your side, Mr. Messina, whether you like it or not. Although I guess this puts the dampener on my new life as a Morelli, huh?” He gave a humorless laugh.
I watched the city speeding past, my mind working over what I knew for sure, what I onlythoughtI knew, and what I didn’t know. There was a lot, it seemed, that I didn’t know. But the strange psychology of these murders did point to one person I could think of. Combined with what I knew of the Castellani business interests…
