“We understand he was the head of the robotics team,” said Blum.
“Yes. That’s housed in the new building on the school grounds. They won the state last year. It was very exciting. Jerome . . . he loved his robots, that was clear. He could build them with such . . . flair.” She dabbed at her eyes with her fingers and said, “How can I help you?”
“We’ve learned from Jerome’s mother that he was fine when he went to school yesterday, but he wasn’t when he got home. He mentioned something about a test and that he had missed some questions.”
“No, that couldn’t be. There were no tests in any class yesterday. It was a prep day for upcoming exams.”
“Okay, then he wasn’t truthful with his mother. Something else was bothering him. And from the timeline it seems that it happened while he was at school.”
“I can’t imagine what that might have been.”
“Can we speak with his teachers?” asked Pine.
“Certainly, I can arrange that.”
“Have the police been in to talk to you?” asked Blum.
“No. They haven’t been by.”
Pine and Blum exchanged a troubled look.
An hour later they had spoken with all of Jerome’s teachers. None of them could recall anything that might have led Jerome to do what he allegedly had. They all expressed shock and sorrow, but provided no useful information.
As they left the school, Pine glanced to her right. “I know him. He was outside the Blakes’ house this morning.”
The person Pine was referring to was sitting on the fence surrounding the new football field.
Pine and Blum walked over to him.
Pine said, “You looked like you knew something but didn’t want to say earlier.”
The young man jumped down and faced them. He was about Pine’s height, lean, and looked as tough as a piece of iron. His face held a jagged scar, and part of one of his fingers was missing.
“Did you know Jerome?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your name?”
He shrugged.
“You followed us here, didn’t you? So you must have something to tell us.”
He looked over her shoulder.
“We think Jerome met someone yesterday who made him do whatever he did last night. Do you know anything about that?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe you do?” prompted Pine.
“See a man talkin’ to him yesterday.”
“Here at the school?”
He nodded.
“Do you go here?” asked Pine.
He shook his head. “Ain’t go to school.”
“You graduated?” asked Blum.
He shrugged, grinned, and said nothing.
“Did you recognize the man he was talking to?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What time of day was it?”
“’Bout two.” He pointed. “Saw ’em talkin’ over there.”
“What did the man look like?”
“White dude. Tall guy with big shoulders.”
“Age?”
“Forties, maybe. Dark hair.”
“How was he dressed?”
“Pants and a shirt.”
“Tie?”
He shook his head.
“You think he worked here?”
“Don’t know.”
“If we can get some pictures together, do you think you could recognize him again?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s your name?” she asked again.
“Peanut. What they call me on the street.”
“How well did you know Jerome?”
“We real tight till a while back.”
“What happened?”
“I quit going to school and he didn’t.”
Pine said, “How did Jerome seem when he and the man parted company?”
“Jerome, he walked off, looking at his shoes. Seemed jumpy to me. Weird, y’know?”
“Do you think Jerome would have shot anyone?”
He cracked a smile. “Shit, lady, Jerome don’t know how to kill nobody.”
CHAPTER
16
THEY HAD GONE BACK INTO the school and asked Norma Bailey if she could put together a photo book and background information of the school employees. She told them that they had it digitally, but it would take her some time to get the necessary permissions to release that information. She added that she would contact Pine when it was ready.
After that they climbed into their car and drove off.
Three minutes later Pine said quietly, “We picked up a tail. Silver Mercury Marquis. Don’t look, Carol!”
Blum caught herself halfway through turning around. “Sorry, Agent Pine. Can you tell who it might be?”
Pine slowed down a bit to let the car catch up and she eyed it through the rearview mirror. “Okay, now I can make out the plate. It looks like a New Jersey state plate.”
“Can you make out the tag number?”
“Yes. Write it down.”
Pine told her the plate number and Blum inputted it on her phone.
“Just a driver or more?”
“A pair.”
“You’re sure they’re following us?”
“Well, we can find out.”
She hung a sharp left, hit the gas, roared through an intersection, and then hung a right.
She peered into the rearview again. “They got caught at the light, but they were following us all right.”
She hit a speed dial on her phone. Puller didn’t answer.
“Why do you think they were tailing us?” said Blum.
“They want to see what leads we’re following up.”
“Did you notice them while we were at the Blakes’?”
“No, but I wasn’t looking, either.”
“So someone from the state government is interested,” opined Blum.
“That guy who gave Puller the third degree was with the federal government, not the state.”
“But still the ‘government.’ Talk about a dog biting its own tail.”
“There might be more to it than that, Carol.”
“This doesn’t have the feel of the typical government turf fight.”
“It has the feel of criminal collusion.”
Her phone buzzed. It was Puller.
He said, “This case has thrown another curve at us.”
“Why, what happened?”
“Teddy Vincenzo was found dead in his cell this morning.”
“What! How?”
“Prelim is suicide or drug overdose. They found him dead when they were doing a head count.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“No, I don’t believe it. I checked his records and photos of him when he went into prison. Not a needle track anywhere on his person, no tooth, nostril, or gum decay, no indication that he was a user. And when we saw him in person, he had no signs of being a user. Second, and most importantly, the timing is a little suspicious.”
“Don’t they have cameras in the prison?” asked Pine.
“They do. I asked about that. Unfortunately, the camera in question was not in operation. They apparently have a maintenance backlog.”
“That’s highly convenient. And if they were doing their head count, he died presumably early this morning, but you only found out recently.”
Puller said, “I doubt they care about keeping me in the loop. I only found out because I was working another channel to get back in to see him. That’s when I was told it was a no-go because he was dead.”
“Damn, that is definitely a curveball all right.”
“So they took out the father,” said Puller.
“Which means the son now sits squarely in the crosshairs.”
“We need to find Tony Vincenzo fast, before he bites it, too,” he said.
“FYI, we picked up a tail today. Whether it was at the Blakes’ home or at the school where we went to see if anything there might have precipitated what hap
pened, I’m not sure. But it was a silver Mercury Marquis with New Jersey state government plates.”
“You get the tag number?” Puller asked.
Pine read it off to Puller from Blum’s phone screen.
“I’ll check that out.”
Pine said, “The people I spoke to, including Blake’s mother, said the cops think it was some gang thing, maybe an initiation. But these same people were also pretty sure Jerome didn’t even know how to fire a gun, much less make a shot like that last night.”
“It all stinks. The local cops have pretty much closed the case. They’re not looking anywhere else.”
“You know we could have been the targets last night, right?” pointed out Pine.
“The thought had occurred to me, yes.”
“His mother said he was going back to school to work on a robotics project, but that wasn’t true. And he lied about messing up a test to explain away why he was worried when he got home from school. And then an old friend of Jerome’s told us that Jerome had been approached by some guy at school, and it made him upset and nervous. I’m trying to run down a lead on that now.”
“What if someone got to him and made him show up in the alley, gave him a gun, and told him to run after he heard the shots?”
“How could they make him do that?” wondered Pine.
“That’s for us to find out.”
“Have they even confirmed that the gun he had was the murder weapon?”
“Not that anyone’s told me,” said Puller in disgust.
“Wait a minute, who’s doing the post and forensics? Surely CID people.”
“All I can tell you is that the local cops took the gun and Jerome Blake’s body and left us with McElroy’s remains.”
“But, Puller, how could that happen? A CID agent was the vic; that makes it your case, or at the very least gets you in the loop.”
“I made that argument last night and this morning and ran into a stone wall. Something about working with local cops to build trust and camaraderie.”
“That’s bullshit,” snapped Pine.
“It is bullshit. And my superiors up the line at CID think the same thing. But apparently orders on this came from up high, maybe past the uniforms and into the land of the suits.”
“What in the hell is going on here, Puller?”
“A cover-up of epic proportions. And for that to happen, there has to be a matching motivation. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put the possibilities here squarely in the double-digit range.”
“We need to find out what that is.”
“I hope I get the chance.”
Pine’s jaw eased down. “You mean—”
“I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I get pulled from the case.”
“What will you do if that happens?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. This has only happened to me once in my career. I never expected that it would happen again.”
“What did you do when it happened the first time?”
“Something I shouldn’t have,” he replied.
“And what will you do if it does happen again?” Puller didn’t answer.
CHAPTER
17
SUPERMAN MIGHT HAVE JUST gotten a dose of kryptonite,” said Pine quietly as she put her phone down. “He’s afraid he’s going to get pulled from the case.”
Blum absorbed this worrying information. “Anything else?”
“Yep, and it’s a stunner. Teddy Vincenzo’s dead. They say it’s a suicide or a drug overdose. Puller obviously doesn’t believe it. And neither do I.”
“I gathered that he was dead from the snatches of conversation I heard.”
“And the local cops have taken over the Jerome Blake case and they have the gun. John was left with McElroy’s body and that’s it.”
“Will he let that stand?”
“He got pushback from high up, perhaps beyond the military.” She glanced at Blum. “The suits outrank the uniforms in our system.”
“Well, it seems the cover-up has started, big-time.”
“I think it started a long time ago, actually.”
“What do we do now while Puller is trying to figure this out and we wait to get the photos for our witness to look at?”
“I’ve got a resource I can call on.”
“Who’s that?”
“The FBI has an RA in Trenton,” said Pine. “I know one of the agents, Rick Davies. Let’s see what he can find out for us.”
She brought Davies up on her list of phone contacts and made the call. Davies answered, and she told him the situation and what she wanted.
“You officially engaged in this?” Davies asked. “I thought you were in Arizona.”
“I was there when the shooting happened. I’m working with Army CID on the case.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll see what I can find out. Just to warn you, the Trenton cops positively do not like feds sniffing around their backyard.”
“Show me a local cop who does.”
She put down the phone and looked over at Blum.
“Now what?” asked Blum.
“Until we hear back from Puller or Davies or the school principal, we focus on another Vincenzo. Ito.”
Blum put her hands together and looked attentive.
Pine began, “Let’s look at this logically. Either Ito killed Mercy . . . ” She paused, stiffening at her own words, and clenched her hands for an instant before relaxing and turning to Blum. “Or he abandoned her somewhere.”
“Or he gave her to someone,” added Blum.
Pine looked startled by Blum’s suggestion but quickly moved on. “Now, Mercy’s DNA is in a database at the FBI. Samples of all unidentified remains discovered anywhere in the U.S. are sent to that database for comparison checks. None have turned up that matched Mercy’s. I know that for a fact.”
“Was that your doing?” asked Blum.
“Yes.”
“What did you give them for Mercy’s DNA sample?”
“I’m her twin, Carol. I gave them a sample of my DNA. They put it in the database.”
“Of course, that was stupid of me. But that’s good news, then. No remains have matched her DNA.”
“Yes. But her remains might not have been found yet. And we can’t be sure that every agency across the country sends samples into the database. I’m sure some of them don’t, or a processing mistake was made. Or maybe she was taken out of the country and killed there.”
“Still, the odds are with you on that.”
“Now, if he had abandoned her, you would think someone would have found her, either dead or alive. She might have died from exposure or from animal attacks if she was left in some wooded terrain, which they have a lot of in rural Georgia. She could have starved to death or died from an accident.”
“But if so, you would think her remains would have been found by now.”
“Bodies out in the elements tend to disappear fast, Carol. Natural decomp, animal intrusion, if she fell into a river and got lodged on something at the bottom, lots of factors.”
Pine suddenly looked like she might be ill.
Blum said quickly, “But once more you have to look at the odds. And unless Ito had checked out a place beforehand to leave her, I doubt a guy from Trenton, New Jersey, and who had probably never been to Georgia, knew very much about places to abandon or get rid of her down there.”
“Well, according to what we found out while we were in Andersonville, he was in Georgia for a few months at the very least.”
“So are you leaning towards her having been abandoned?”
Pine rubbed her head and looked uncertainly at her friend. “That wouldn’t dovetail with the letter we read from Bruno. He was clearly pissed. He wanted revenge.”
Now Blum looked uncertain. “The only thing that cuts against that is everything we’ve learned about Ito thus far. It takes a lot to kill someone. It takes a lot more to kill a defenseless child.”
“He could have been driven to it by
his love for his brother. By what happened to him.”
“May I play devil’s advocate?” said Blum.
“Please do.”
“How do we know that Ito loved Bruno? We’ve found no evidence of that.”
“Well, he went down to Georgia and took my sister and nearly killed me and then accused my father of the crimes.”
“Okay, let’s assume that is true. But the life he led before was polar opposite to his brother’s. And remember what Castor told us. He knew Bruno was a bad guy.”
“But he said he learned that from Evie, not Ito.”
“And you don’t think husband and wife were in agreement on that? I think they clearly were, from what we’ve learned.”
Pine thought about this for a moment. “Castor also told us that he never met Bruno.”
“That’s right. He worked for Ito all those years. Was with him every day all day, and Ito’s brother, who presumably lived in the area, or at least in New York City, never came by for a visit?”
Pine said, “And Evie’s neighbor didn’t like Bruno, either. And she said Evie hated him. Wouldn’t allow him in the house. And Ito didn’t object to that. The neighbor said Ito didn’t like Bruno.”
“Exactly my point.”
“Then why go down to Georgia at all and do what he did?” said a puzzled Pine.
“It might come down to what we read in the letter. It didn’t say much, but it did tell us that Bruno had maybe tried to do the decent thing for once in his life—not turn in a mole that was going after the Mafia families—and he ended up getting screwed. Maybe that just snapped something inside Ito. That sounds more plausible than trying to make Ito some cold-blooded killer on a rampage. Because that does not square with what everyone has told us about him.”
Pine sat back and pondered all of this. “I checked the police records. Before Ito came down to Georgia, Teddy was charged with grand theft auto and got prison time.”
“So Ito perhaps had in his mind that Teddy was going down the same path that Bruno had?”
Pine said, “It’s possible. And that might have fueled his fire to do what he did. Remember what he told Castor, that he’d done something that ‘shocked him.’ ”
“So it was a confused and perhaps conflicted man who came down to Georgia, then?”
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