by Marc Rainer
“I’ve got her,” Trask said, picking Boo up in his arms. “The emergency vet’s on the highway. Stay with the other pups. I’ll call when I know something.”
He was up the stairs and in the garage in seconds, putting Boo in the backseat of the Jeep. He remembered something else, darted back into the house, and ran back to the garage.
The clinic was about twenty minutes away. He made it in twelve.
Trask picked the big dog up and carried her inside without hooking the leash in his hand to her collar. A tech hurried around the counter and connected the leash, then walked Boo back to an exam area while Trask filled out the paperwork. He met the veterinarian in the exam room.
Boo was lying on a table, an IV already in her right front leg.
“You’re lucky I was on duty tonight,” the vet began, “and you did the right thing bringing her in when you did. When did you first see the blood?”
“Maybe twenty minutes ago,” Trask said. He breathed a little easier, hearing the positive tone in the vet’s voice. The man was at least as old as Trask, not some whiz-kid who looked like he’d been out of school for only a month or two.
“I specialize in auto-immune diseases,” the vet said. “The symptoms here point to one that’s often carried by ticks in this area. Has she been somewhere recently where she might have picked one up?”
“We’ve been going to the local dog parks,” Trask said, “but they’re pretty open, and sprayed regularly.” He stopped. “We took the dogs to another park a few days ago—one in Blue Springs off I-70—because the local one was closed for maintenance. It was pretty heavily wooded.”
“That’s probably where she got it,” the vet said, moving a stethoscope around Boo’s chest.
“How’s she doing?” Trask asked. “How serious—?”
“It would have been very serious if you’d waited at all before getting her here. We have some drugs that work pretty well—and pretty fast—on this strain of disease, but we’ll have to keep her overnight at least. It may take a couple of days before she’s out of the woods.”
Trask nodded. He reached into a coat pocket and handed the doctor a vial.
“I grabbed this from the fridge on the way out the door. It’s her insulin. She’s diabetic. She gets fifteen units twice a day after her meals.”
“We’ll have to run some blood tests anyway to do periodic checks on the auto-immune infection,” the vet said. “We’ll check her blood sugar numbers, too. Go home and get some sleep. We’ll call you with any updates. You’ve done exactly what you needed to do for her.”
Trask walked over to the table and gave the big dog a hug and a kiss on the head. Boo responded with a lick on his chin.
“Get better, Boo-boo,” Trask said. He held the tears back until he was outside the lobby. A light snow was starting to fall in the parking lot.
Kansas City, Missouri
Lord, I have tried to pursue the truth, and believe that I have found it, but if I am wrong, let your wisdom guide the jury to justice, whatever the correct verdict might be … Trask had one more thought before concluding his usual pre-trial prayer … and please watch over our little Boo, and—if it is your will—bring her through this illness and send her back to us, but whatever the result, guide us to spare her any pain. Amen.
He opened his eyes and saw John Foote looking at him from across the counsel table.
“You okay?” Foote asked him.
“Fine,” Trask nodded. “Have you heard from Velasco?”
They whispered to keep others in the courtroom from overhearing. Cam Turner leaned in from his seat beside Trask so that he could hear.
“Just got off the phone with him,” Foote said. “He’s still in Dallas, waiting for Cannon to move. The guy just keeps making runs to a pet store every couple of days. He hasn’t headed north yet.”
“Do we have any reason to believe the pet store is involved in any way?”
“Not unless Cannon’s smuggling the heroin inside mice.”
“Mice?” Cam asked.
“Yeah, mice,” Foote responded. “Cannon buys a bunch of mice every couple of days and drives home with ’em. Velasco thinks the pet shop owner is straight—he hasn’t got any record—so he chatted him up. The dude showed him the receipts.”
“All rise.” The courtroom clerk stood as she waited for Judge Brooks to take the bench. Trask and the others rose in unison.
“Let’s get started,” the judge said. “Any motions before we bring the jury in?”
“We have none, Your Honor,” Trask said.
“The defense has no motions, Judge,” Papi’s attorney responded.
Trask looked across the courtroom at his opponent for the trial. The court had appointed William Hobart to represent the defendant, Hobart was an aging, caricature of a lawyer who seemed to have jumped off the page of an Honoré Daumier print. Hobart had a monotone baritone of a voice that was guaranteed to lull most jurors to sleep, and specialized in going to trial in futile cases, an approach guaranteed to maximize both his payment and the sentence received by his client.
Just as I thought, Trask said to himself. A long guilty plea.
He had delegated the opening statement to Cam, who delivered it flawlessly. Hobart reserved his opening statement until the start of the defense case.
Their witnesses began the long parade to the stand. Trask had arranged the order of witnesses to include Drew Henderson at the end of the morning. Drew was offered by Trask and accepted by the court as an expert in the functioning of photographic and video recording equipment, due to his technical training provided by the FBI. Trask smiled to himself, remembering what he had heard about “Drew-vision” from Henderson’s supervisor, and also from John Foote. The story had already gained wide circulation in all the local law enforcement circles. It had apparently not gotten to the ears of William Hobart, who did not object to Henderson being qualified to testify as an expert.
Henderson testified that he had examined the recordings made by Papi’s closed circuit surveillance system, found them to be unaltered, and that he had examined the recording equipment taken from Papi’s shop and had found it to be functioning properly.
After a lunch break, Trask began his direct examinations of the three former employees of Papi’s chop shop who had agreed to cooperate and testify for the government. Using the video recordings, the first two cooperators were able to describe the process by which the conspirators’ load cars had entered the shop, the vehicles’ secret compartments had been opened, and the concealed cocaine had been extracted for distribution. Trask’s method of presentation converted the testimony of the informants into video tour guides, with their narrations explaining the videos, and the videos serving to corroborate everything that the witnesses said.
The technique also effectively blunted any of Hobart’s feeble attempts at cross-examination, since the jury was able to see the events related by the informants on the screens before them in the courtroom. They saw the events exactly as they had occurred and exactly as the witnesses described them.
Yes, the witnesses were criminals themselves. Yes, they told Hobart, they had been part of the conspiracy charged. Yes, they were cooperating in hopes of a reduced sentence. But they were still telling the truth, as anyone watching the videos could see for themselves. Hobart kept walking into dead ends on his cross, and by the end of his examination of the second informant, he was already displaying the fatalistic manner of a beaten man just going through the motions.
What had promised to be a two or three-day trial was moving so rapidly, thanks to Hobart’s abbreviated cross-examinations, that Trask had to tell Ronnie Lincoln—who was serving as their witness wrangler for the day—to have all the witnesses available for immediate testimony.
Midafternoon found Arturo Diaz on the stand, and Trask—using his final set of Papi’s own videos—was able to walk the shop supervisor through a complete exposition of the conspirators’ various identities, roles, crimes and schemes. Diaz put
Papi at the top of it all, and Hobart’s half-hearted cross-examination didn’t lay a glove on him.
The government case concluded with Cam calling all the various lab technicians to testify about the tests confirming that the drugs seized had, in fact, been cocaine, and that the aggregate amount seized had been in excess of fifteen kilograms.
Trask stood and announced to Judge Brooks that the government had rested its case, surprisingly in one day.
“Counsel, please approach,” Brooks ordered.
At the bench, in a hushed conference masked from the jury by white noise pumped into the courtroom, Brooks asked Hobart if he was prepared to proceed with his defense case.
“I am not, Your Honor,” Hobart stated. “I anticipated that the government case was going to last a lot longer than this.”
Trask started to respond, but the judge waved him back.
“And I am sure that Mr. Trask, in estimating the time his case would take to present, was counting on longer cross-examinations from you, Mr. Hobart. I am not in any way expressing any criticism of your approach by saying that. In fact, such brevity is often more effective, in my experience. Nevertheless, here we are.”
The judge looked at his watch.
“It’s four o’clock, gentlemen,” Brooks said. “I propose that we adjourn for the day and give Mr. Hobart time to prepare his thoughts and let him present his defense tomorrow. Any objections?”
“No, Your Honor,” Trask said.
It’ll give the jury nothing but my case to sleep on tonight. I’ve always liked resting for the evening at the end of my case. It gives the defense more time to prepare for their own case, but some of the jurors’ minds will be pretty set in stone by the time they hear anything from the other side.
“No objection,” Hobart echoed.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Brooks said. “How many witnesses will you have, Mr. Hobart? I assume you’ll have a case to present since you reserved your opening statement.”
“Just my client, Your Honor,” Hobart replied.
“Very well,” the judge declared. “I’ll see everyone back here at eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”
Trask rushed to return to his office from the courtroom. He grabbed the desk phone with one hand as he was pulling his other arm out of his suitcoat. Lynn answered on the second ring.
“How’s our baby?” he asked her. “Did you hear from the vet?”
“She’s going to make it,” Lynn said.
“Thank God.”
“But there was another complication.”
“What’s that?” Trask asked, falling into his chair.
“When they did her blood work, her blood sugar was sky high on top of the auto-immune issue. They gave her more insulin, using some of their own stuff, and her levels dropped back to where they should be. The doc thinks the last vial of insulin we got was bad, and it wasn’t helping her at all.”
Trash shook his head. “Poor thing. We had no way of knowing. I wish they could talk so they could tell us when something is wrong.”
“So do I. Anyway, other than that, it’s all good news. He said we could probably plan on picking her up late tomorrow, as long as there weren’t any setbacks.”
“Thank God,” Trask said again.
“You already did,” Lynn said. “And so did I.”
John Foote was leaving the courthouse when his cell phone buzzed.
“Foote,” he said as he answered the call.
“Maybe you could tell me why all of our clubs in town suddenly have state health inspectors shutting down our kitchens. Maybe you could also tell me why you didn’t give me a heads-up about whatever the hell the problem is, so I could fix it before I had all these state health inspectors crawling up my ass.”
“Hello, Mr. Minelli. How are you?”
“Don’t give me that shit, John,” Fat Tony barked. “I thought we had an understanding—a professional agreement.”
“We did, and we do. Part of that understanding—as I recall it—was that we wouldn’t arrest every family member on your side who might know something about something, as long as they weren’t actually participating in illegal activity. You, in return, agreed that there would never be any violence attempted against any member of law enforcement or their families. Am I mistaken?”
“No.”
“Good to know.”
Minelli almost threw his cell phone against the wall.
“Dammit, John! You’re not telling me what the problem is here. I’m losing my ass because of these shut-downs!”
Foote was slow and deliberate in his response.
“Tony, assuming—hypothetically, of course—that I, being a federal law enforcement official, had any control whatsoever over the actions of inspectors who are employed by the state government of Missouri, you might assume—again hypothetically—that someone on your side of our understanding had broken the rules. That infraction might have been—for example—shooting up the residence of a federal prosecutor.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I assumed you would know. I thought you were in control of your organization.”
“Shit!” Minelli shouted. “You know I would never sanction anything like that. Who do you think did it?”
“If we knew, the responsible party would not be on the streets right now. He’d be in a lockup.”
Minelli was silent for a moment. He needed a hint.
“Tell me this if you can, John. What was the last case this prosecutor—the one whose house got shot up—what was the last case he had that involved any of my guys?”
“I can tell you that, Tony. It was the shootings at McElhaney’s bar.”
Minelli paused again. When he did speak, it was with an angry snarl.
“That stupid little shit. I’ve had enough of him. Tell me this. If we resolve this issue, how long will it take—hypothetically, of course—for these state guys to leave our clubs alone?”
Foote smiled to himself as he took his own pause.
“Tony, I would venture to say—just a guess, of course—that your relief might be almost immediate. I do need to make sure you know that we would view any violence in resolving this action—against anyone—as a criminal and prosecutable violation of the law. If—on the other hand—the responsible party came forward, turned himself in and admitted his wrongdoing, that would certainly be the optimal outcome.”
“Yeah, I hear ya.”
The line went dead. Foote smiled again and headed for his car.
Kansas City, Missouri
Paul Beretta sat behind his desk in the office of Bottoms, the juice bar he owned in the west bottoms section of Kansas City. He rose as he heard the knock on the office door. He had expected it.
“C’mon in. It’s open.”
The door opened and Dominic Silvestri, Sr., stood in the doorway.
“Thanks for coming, Dom. I appreciate it,” Beretta said, extending his hand. Silvestri shook it. “Have a seat.”
Beretta motioned to one of two leather chairs facing his desk. After Silvestri sat, Beretta took the other chair.
“The reason why I called, Dom, is that I wanted to give you a heads-up about—”
“About my stupid kid.” Silvestri cut off Beretta’s sentence, finishing it for him. Big Dom shook his head. “What can you do, Paulie? You try and raise ’em right, make sure they respect our thing and our rules, then the dummy goes and shoots up a fed’s goddamn house. The don called me an hour ago. I’ve never heard him so mad.”
Beretta leaned back, surprised. “So, you knew about that.” He looked at the floor, then shrugged. “It gets worse, Dom. There’s something else. Something a lot worse.”
“What are you talking about?” Silvestri asked.
Beretta looked him in the eye.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Dom. I really am. I know we’ve had our differences from time to time, but we took the same oath. We serve the same family here. I’ve been thinking all night ab
out what I would do if the tables were turned—you know—if you were telling me this instead of the other way around.”
“Telling me what, Paulie?” Silvestri’s voice contained the slightest hint of fear.
“One of my guys came in and told me that your boy admitted hitting Big John and Margie.”
Silvestri sat forward. “That’s bullshit! He told me he had nuthin’ to do with that and didn’t know who did.”
“I’ve got something to show you,” Beretta said. “I wouldn’t have taken this information at face value without something more, but I had a guy inside one of the boats. He worked security, and he kept me up to speed on any of our guys who might be pouring too much cash into the slots. I figured that if we were coming up short on any of our cuts, that might be a good reason for it. Anyway, he took this and gave me a copy.”
Beretta turned the laptop on his desk so that it faced the two chairs. He pressed a button, and the recording started. Silvestri watched in stricken disbelief as he saw his son and the Gonzalez brothers following John Porcello out of the main doors of the casino.
“Look at the date and time stamp,” Beretta said. “This was taken just a few minutes before Big John and Margie were hit.”
Silvestri collapsed back into his chair.
“What the hell do I do, Paulie?”
“That’s your call, Dom. It’s a helluva decision to make, but we both know what our orders are. The Don’s already hot as hell about your kid shooting at the feds. We can’t sit on this forever.”
“What about your guy at the boat?” Silvestri asked. “Can we buy him off? Keep this quiet? Keep it a mystery?”
“I thought about that. I took care of it, Dom. He won’t be telling anybody anything.”
Silvestri exhaled. “Wow. I really appreciate that, Paulie. I really do.” His brow tightened as a thought crossed his mind. He looked up at Beretta. “The Gonzalez brothers?”
“Yeah, I took care of them, too.”