by Sal Bianchi
“Are you kidding me?” I groaned, my hopes of finding another line to the killer instantly dashed. “It wasn’t misplaced. Someone took it.”
“I don’t think that’s--” Officer Warren tried to argue.
“Yeah, well, I do,” I interrupted him before stalking away toward the entrance. Whoever had raided Ryan’s hotel room had somehow gotten here too. Somehow, they’d snuck into a luxury hotel, disabled a card reader, and ransacked a room without anyone noticed. As if that wasn’t enough, they’d also somehow stolen evidence straight out of a police station.
I sank heavily onto a bench outside the police station. As much as I hated to admit it, all signs pointed to the mafia being involved in this.
“Hey,” Jase called as he stepped out of the station and came to sit next to me. “They’re starting an investigation. I asked them to send us their security tapes as well.”
“Right,” I scoffed. “Do you really think they’ll find anything?”
Jase didn’t respond. Instead, he just cast me a sad look. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing that I was.
“What are you going to do?” he asked after a few moments of silence.
“I’m not leaving the case,” I replied with a determination that even surprised me. “I can’t keep running away forever, right?”
He gave me the same sad look from before.
“Stop staring at me like I’m some charity case,” I snapped. “Don’t you need to call Flint and let him know what happened?”
“Yeah,” he sighed after a few seconds of hesitation. I was avoiding the conversation, and he probably knew it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared about what might happen now. If the mafia really was involved with this, then I’d be openly going against them for the first time since I’d left the Family. This, on top of the fact that Ian’s “lawyer” seemed to know who I was, all seemed to indicate that this may all actually be the work of the mafia. Specifically, my former Family.
Still, as much as it filled me with dread, the same thought filled me with a sense of elation. I’d spent the past three years walking on eggshells, too nervous to even visit the woman who had practically raised me on her own. Maybe it was about time I stopped living in the shadows of my own city.
26
Bette
My mind was reeling as I left the office with Theo. Initially, the SDCT had taken on the case because Senator Rothschild was an influential and controversial politician, and it was possible that her murder had been politically motivated. Now, though, it seemed as though we’d stumbled upon something much bigger and more complicated than we’d initially anticipated.
Director Flint had tasked Theo and me with investigating the murder of Carl Johannson. Since we already knew that Ian Brooks had been the one to smother him to death with a pillow, our next course of action was to speak with Angela Martin, the person with the most motive to want him dead.
“This is it,” Theo announced as we pulled up to the apartment building. It was an unimpressive residential building located in a modest area of the city. “Do you want to handle the talking? She might be more comfortable with a female agent, considering the circumstances.”
“Sure.” I nodded as we got out of the car and headed into the building. To be honest, I’d had conflicting feelings when I’d heard the details of the case. I was no stranger to how it felt, as a woman, to be harassed and victimized by someone and not have anyone to turn to for help. The entire reason I’d decided to become a federal agent was that I knew firsthand how often female victims were cast aside and ignored, and I wanted to do something to change that reality.
To be honest, I’d felt satisfaction when I heard that Carl had been killed. If he really had spent a year tormenting some poor woman, then he deserved it, in my opinion. Still, as a federal agent, I couldn’t condone vigilantism. As much as I could sympathize with what Angela must have been feeling, she’d still taken the law into her own hands and taken a hit out on someone.
Before I knew it, we’d arrived at Angela’s door, and I still wasn’t entirely sure what I should say. Regardless, there was no point in putting it off for any longer, so I reached forward and knocked twice.
For a long moment, there was no response. I was just about to knock again when the door creaked open, and a pretty woman with long blond hair looked out at us.
“Hello,” she eyed us warily. “Can I help you with something?”
“Hi,” I replied. “I’m Agent Owens with the SDCT. Are you Angela Martin?”
“Oh, yeah,” Angela replied timidly. “That’s me. Is anything wrong?”
“We just wanted a moment of your time,” I answered vaguely. If I told her outright what we were here for, she might get scared and turn us away. Once we were inside, it would be more difficult for her to refuse us. “Would it be all right if we came inside and asked you a few questions?”
“Oh, sure,” she replied. Her eyes were wide, and she had a startled, confused expression on her face.
“Thank you,” I replied curtly before stepping through the doorway. Her apartment was decorated with a mishmash of furniture of different styles. Photos and drawings were pinned up on the walls, and every flat surface in sight was completely covered with a variety of knick-knacks and trinkets. It was a bit cluttered for my tastes, but it looked cozy and lived-in.
“Would you like some tea?” Angela offered as she led us over to a lumpy, worn-looking couch in the center of the living room. “Or some water, maybe?”
“We’re fine, thank you,” I answered for both of us as I took a seat on the couch.
“Oh, okay,” Angela muttered meekly before taking a seat opposite us. She had a really soft-spoken demeanor, so I could see how it might have been easy for Carl to take advantage of her. At the same time, it was difficult to believe that such a gentle person could have taken out a hit on someone.
“I’m going to get straight to it,” I addressed her immediately. “We want to talk to you about Carl Johannson.”
Angela went rigid at my words.
“What about him?” She asked as she hunched her shoulders nervously.
“You filed several police reports against him, didn’t you?” I asked blankly.
“Yes.” Angela nodded slowly.
“Can you tell us why you did that?” I asked when she didn’t offer any more information.
“He was harassing me,” she hissed, suddenly sounding much less meek than before. “Following me home from work, sending things to my apartment. It was kind of sweet at first. Like an ego boost, you know? But I told him I wasn’t interested, and he just wouldn’t stop!”
“Did he stop after you called the police?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. This was the most she’d spoken since we’d gotten here. If I kept prodding, she’d probably get even more worked up.
“No,” she replied bitterly. “They always said they’d go out and talk to him and tell him to stop, but of course, that didn’t do anything. They arrested him a few times when they caught him sneaking around my apartment, but he was always out after a day or two.”
Her hands were clenched into fists on her lap, and she was nearly shouting now.
“You must have been pretty relieved when he died,” I stated calmly.
Her eyes went wide at my accusation, and she floundered for a moment before collecting herself enough to respond.
“I was.” She nodded. “He deserved it. He spent almost a whole year harassing me, and no one else would do anything about it. I’m not afraid to leave my apartment anymore.”
“That’s good to hear,” I replied. “How did you find out he was dead?”
“W-what?” she stuttered. She seemed taken aback by my sudden question.
“I asked you how you found out he was dead,” I repeated as I stared hard into her eyes. “It must have come as a shock when he suddenly stopped showing up, but how did you find out he had died?”
Her mouth gaped open and closed for a second as she
struggled to come up with an answer. I’d noticed right away that she hadn’t been the least bit shocked when I mentioned that Carl was dead. It struck me as a little unusual. Obviously, she would have noticed that Carl was no longer harassing her, but that didn’t explain how she knew he was actually dead.
“The police told me,” she mumbled after a few moments of hesitation.
“Really?” I asked skeptically. “The same police who completely ignored you when you went to them for help? They were kind of enough to come and give you the news of his demise?”
“Well, I…” Angela murmured as she wrung her hands nervously.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Theo shooting me a confused glare. When he’d suggested that I be the one to speak to Angela earlier, he’d probably expected that I’d be sympathetic and gentle. However, as much as I disliked men like Carl, I wasn’t about to go easy on someone who had paid to have another person killed.
“Who told you that Carl was dead, Angela?” I snapped when she continued to stutter dumbly.
“I think you should go,” she whimpered as she stood on shaky legs.
“Was it the people who hired to kill him?” I went straight for the kill, and Angela fell back onto the couch as her legs gave out from beneath her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.
“Yes, you do,” I sneered as I leaned down to glare at her. “I know that you didn’t kill him. The real murderer already confessed. Ian Brooks was his name, wasn’t it? There’s no point in denying it since he was the one who told us you hired him.”
That last part was a bluff, but Angela was already on the brink of tears and looked like she might break at any moment.
“I didn’t mean to,” she sniffled pathetically.
“Didn’t mean to what?” I scoffed. “You didn’t mean to put a hit out on someone? Or you didn’t mean to get caught? Cut the crap, Angela. This is going to go a lot worse for you if you don’t stop lying.”
“I’m sorry,” Angela yelled as the floodgates broke, and fat tears started to roll down her face. “I was just so tired of feeling scared all the time! The police wouldn’t do anything! Every day he got more aggressive, and I knew I was going to end up dead if I didn’t do something soon.”
I felt a pang of sympathy as I looked down at her. She looked so pitiful curled into herself like that, but I quickly pushed the thought away.
“So what did you do then?” I asked. “How did you find the hitman?”
“One of my friends told me about this website,” she explained through tears. “It was like a message board where people could go to buy weed and stuff. We wrote that we needed someone to kill Carl. It was kind of a joke a first, like just a way for me to vent about all the stuff he’d done. A lot of the replies seemed like they were joking too. But then one guy replied, and he sounded like he was serious.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“He sent me a direct message,” Angela explained. “Instead of replying on the public post, he told me to DM him my email if I really wanted to talk about him doing the hit. I kind of panicked and didn’t reply at first.”
“So what happened?” I replied. “Obviously, you did contact him in the end.”
“Yeah.” Angela nodded. “I thought it over that night. I thought about how long I’d spent looking over my shoulder, and making sure all my doors and windows were locked, and worrying if I’d suddenly see Carl somewhere. The thought of making it all stop sounded so good.”
“So you got in touch with him,” I surmised.
“Yeah,” she replied. “He made me pay him five grand, and then he told me that I would…”
She trailed off before finishing her sentence. Her breath was shallow, and she was clenching her fists again.
“He told you to kill someone, right?” I asked.
Her head snapped up to look at me so fast it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d given herself whiplash.
“How did you know?” she whimpered.
“So you admit that you did?” I asked coldly.
She looked down at the ground and nodded slowly. I felt bad for her. She didn’t deserve what happened to her, and she must have felt extremely desperate to do what she did. Still, she’d just admitted not only to taking a hit out on someone but to actually murdering someone herself.
“I slipped some drugs into this girl’s drink at a bar,” she admitted quietly. “I don’t even know who she was. The guy just sent me a photo of her and an address.”
“What kind of drugs?” I asked. “And where did you get them?”
“That same website.” She shrugged. “My friend got drugs there all the time. I waited until she was already drunk so she wouldn’t notice the taste, then I slipped a bunch of coke and molly into her drink. It only took about ten minutes for her to fall over.”
Any sympathy I still felt for her evaporated as I listened to what she’d done.
“Agent Duncan.” I addressed Theo for the first time since we’d gotten here. “Please place Ms. Martin under arrest. I’m going to step out and call the office.”
As Theo got up to apprehend Angela, I turned on my heel and swiftly walked out of the apartment. Once I was outside and out of sight, I allowed myself to relax.
I leaned against the wall beside the front door and went over the interrogation in my head. I hadn’t made any mistakes, and even though I felt a little bad about how brutal I’d been, I didn’t regret having acted that way. It got me the result I needed, after all, and I couldn’t show weakness in front of a suspect, regardless of how sympathetic I felt toward her plight. I’d learned a long time ago that I wouldn’t get anywhere in life unless I shut away my emotions and learned to dominate others. I couldn’t afford to make an exception for some pathetic woman like her.
27
Nick
Jase headed back to the office after we left the police station, and I decided to head back to my apartment. It was still early enough that I might be able to look more into that infidelity case, and after not having any luck on the SDCT case, I really needed some kind of distraction.
I settled in at my desk and went over the details of the case again. The client was a woman named Christine Thompson. Her husband, Anthony Thompson, had been behaving oddly for the past couple of months, coming home late, hiding his phone from her, all the typical signs of unfaithful behavior. Honestly, his actions were so suspicious that I could have told her without even investigating that he was definitely cheating on her, but obviously, people wanted solid proof when it came to those sorts of things.
I’d last seen Thompson in a small cafe in Northern Miami, meeting up with a woman. However, as suspicious as that seemed, they hadn’t said or done anything explicit enough at the time for me to say conclusively that he was cheating on his wife. Flint had called me right after that, and I’d been unable to follow him and the woman after they’d left the restaurant.
According to the schedule the wife had given me, he would usually leave work at around six. If I left now, I might be able to get to his workplace with a few minutes to spare.
I quickly got up and double-checked that I had my gun on me before I left the office. After making sure the doors were locked securely, I headed over to my car. The sky was getting darker, but there was still light enough out that I could see without using my headlights.
The drive over to Thompson’s office took longer than I thought it would. I hadn’t accounted for the evening rush hour traffic, and it was fifteen minutes past six by the time I made it to the building. I cursed silently to myself as I pulled into an empty spot at the end of the parking lot. There were barely any cars left, and I knew that I had most likely missed my chance to follow him.
I leaned back in my seat and took a glance around the parking lot as I tried my best to remember what Thompson’s car looked like. If I recalled correctly, he’d been driving a large minivan the last time I’d followed him. I couldn’t remember the exact colo
r, but I knew it was either black or dark blue. There was a car parked near the other end of the parking lot that looked similar, but it was too far away for me to be sure, and I was worried that I would arouse suspicion if I started circling the parking lot.
I turned back to the entrance with a sigh. I resolved to put the case off for another day. When I leaned forward to put the car back in drive, I froze when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked back up and, to my surprise, saw Thompson walking casually through the front doors of the office building, heading straight for a cherry red car parked near the entrance.
I put my car back in park and scrambled to turn around and grab my camera from where it was stashed in the footwell of the backseat. I brought it up to my face and started recording just as Thompson ducked into the passenger side of the car. I adjusted some of the settings on the camera so that I could zoom in more closely. It was a little difficult to tell from this angle, but I could clearly see Thomspon leaning forward toward whoever was in the driver’s seat.
Unfortunately, the view was obstructed by the frame of the car, and although it certainly looked like the two were kissing, I couldn’t be sure. I sighed in frustration and put the camera down in the passenger seat before putting the car back in drive, ready to follow wherever they went.
They stayed like that for a few minutes, and just as I was considering just moving my own car closer to get a better angle, the driver of the red car finally put it in reverse and backed out of the parking spot.
I followed them for about ten minutes until they came to a spot outside of a small bar I didn’t recognize. Normally, I would have parked far away to avoid being detected. This time, however, I parked directly behind them. There weren’t any other spaces free nearby this late in the evening, and I was hoping to get lucky and catch them in the act now that I had an unobstructed view through the rear windshield.
I quickly lifted the camera back up to my face and pointed it directly toward their car. This was insanely risky since there was no way they wouldn’t spot me if they happened to glance into their rearview mirror.