Donovan, who had learned his lesson about believing the words of shifty cops, continued to appear indifferent to Billy’s thoughtful statements. But I could tell by his posture and by the pained look in his eyes that he wished he could take the police detective at his word. I could also sense that some part of him had still been holding out a tiny bit of hope that Sebastian had lied about killing Jeremy. Donovan didn’t welcome Billy’s confirmation of this bad news.
“So, Andy had been lying to us on the phone,” Donovan said, with no small degree of accusation. “All those things he talked about, saying he’d asked Gideon how my brother was doing…he knew Jeremy was dead from the beginning. And he told us he’d only seen Gideon twice—in the summer of ’76 and then in May of this year. Sounds like they’d had much more contact than that.”
“Andy was undercover, playing a well-developed role, Donovan. His only objective was to pass along those documents to you from Gideon—which I’d helped them compile—and to get you and Aurora to contact William James,” Billy said. “It was critical to the building of our case that we established proof of a criminal link between Sebastian James and his Minnesota cousin.”
“Why? Didn’t you already know they were criminals? Sebastian James killed Jeremy. And his cousin—” I stopped.
True, I’d always distrusted Officer William James and had suspected he’d been a dirty cop for the past two years, but it had been an intuitive thing for me. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, he’d seemed so deceitful, despite his youthful hipness and general popularity. Yet, even I had doubted my own perceptions when my brother—via Andy—had said it was okay to trust him.
“Sorry,” I said. “I think, maybe, we need you to start earlier than meeting my brother. Go back to the ‘bad seeds’ and explain how this all started. Please.”
Billy Neville nodded.
“There was a Chicago journalist,” he began, “named Patrick Bradley. Your brother called him Treak. Treak Bradley had been working to crack a big story that involved a vendetta between a crime boss by the name of Vincent Leto and a corrupt union leader called Julian Carello. We’re talking about two major scumbags here, but they’re powerful ones who’ve evaded the law for years, all while threatening each other and retaliating violently whenever they could.”
Billy poured himself some coffee and, after offering us a cup to each of us, continued. “In late 1974, Carello stole Leto’s mistress at the time, and Leto responded by murdering a couple of Carello’s union heads, with the help of Leto’s henchmen, Rick Brice, who’d been on the city’s police force back then. Carello did some nasty stuff in return and framed Brice for it, which resulted in Brice eventually losing his badge.”
I remembered a few hazy details about union problems in those police reports and nodded at the officer, encouraging him to continue.
“In 1975 and ‘76, there was a full-scale war going on between them. Carello’s car and house in Chicago were bombed a number of times, and some of Carello’s ‘business interests’ in other parts of the country—including many holdings in cities along Route 66—went up in flames, too. Leto was a master of union intimidation schemes. While he focused most of his attention on Carello, there were other high-ranking union officers and business owners that were under attack by him as well. Leto needed a steady stream of explosive material that was cheap, easy to make and couldn’t be noticeably traced back to him.”
“So, he went out of state to get it,” Donovan said. “To Crescent Cove, Wisconsin.”
“Yep. He financed a fireworks factory not far from there.” Billy flipped open a box of Girl Scout cookies. “Thin Mint?”
“Thanks,” I said and, to be polite, I took one. Donovan took three.
“The journalist was a bright guy,” Billy said, “and he picked up a few patterns the other investigators had missed. He noticed a link between some of the out-of-state bombings and deliveries by the Americana Trucking company. Especially odd because fireworks were being shipped to some states that had their own big suppliers. And there was one driver whose name kept showing up again and again.”
“Hal Chaney,” I supplied.
“Exactly.” Billy downed several gulps of coffee and popped a chocolate-mint cookie into his mouth. “Addictive, these things,” he said with a wink. “You want another one? I stocked up.”
I shook my head. Donovan took three more.
“Hal was not such a bright guy. He wanted to be taken more seriously and paid a higher salary for the jobs he was doing,” the cop said. “But he didn’t understand just how far over his head he was or how expendable the mob would consider someone like him to be.” Billy sighed. “And he screwed up a lot of lives and jeopardized the FBI’s covert investigation because of his idiocy.”
“How did he mess up the investigation?” Donovan said. “Because of his demands?”
Billy bobbed his head. “While Treak was working on the Wisconsin pipe-bomb angle, which the FBI didn’t know about at the time, the government agents were tackling the problem from the corrupt union and dirty cop side. They’d been tracking the progression of union-intimidation bombings throughout cities along Route 66 and had suspected Vincent Leto of spearheading most of them. I’d been recruited by the FBI to act as a potential player in the game. Letting the word out through established undercover agents that I was a police officer who could be bribed.”
“And they tried to bribe you?” I asked.
“Yes. Eventually, I was contacted by one of Leto’s men and offered money if I’d be the cop who’d scotch the details of the investigation in my department and keep the state out when the explosives were detonated. The target was going to be a housing development on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I agreed. My Fed buddies and I were going to be ready to take down the operation when the shipment got here…but it never did.”
“Because word got back to Leto that Hal Chaney was going to talk, and Sebastian James killed him,” I guessed.
“Yes, Aurora.”
“But who killed Treak and that filmmaker, Ben Rainwater?” I asked him. “And who confiscated Gideon’s car and the files in Treak’s apartment?”
“It took us some time to piece all of that together,” the cop admitted. “Your brother was the one who’d helped us a lot with that leg of the investigation. When we matched the description of the man Gideon and Jeremy had seen up at that burnt-out mill in Wisconsin—”
“Bonner Mill,” Donovan interjected.
“That’s right. When we compared his observations to our records and showed him a photograph, it turned out to be Rick Brice,” Billy said.
“I knew it,” I murmured.
The police detective shot me an interested look. “How? How could you have guessed that?”
“From Treak’s notes. I narrowed the names down from there.”
“You have some of his notes?” he asked.
I pulled out the shorthand pages I’d decoded back in Missouri, but I didn’t want to explain how we’d gotten them.
“Don’t worry,” Billy said. “Gideon told me and the core members of our team about Amy Lynn Dreamson and the few items he’d left with her. Her whereabouts are top secret. No need for anyone besides our small circle to know, unless absolutely necessary. It’s safer for her that way.” He studied the sheets of paper I’d handed him. “I was going to arrange to get the film back for evidence but, from what Gideon said of the notes, we didn’t think there would be enough useful information on those few pages to bother retrieving them.” He looked at them more closely. “You decoded these?”
I nodded.
“My name’s on here…”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why we weren’t all that anxious to meet you.”
He laughed—a good-natured chuckle—and put his hand lightly on my shoulder. “Oh, Aurora. I’m hoping I can make you change your mind about that before too long.”
***
In spite of ourselves, both Donovan and I did, actually, change our minds about A
lbuquerque police detective Billy Neville. By the end of that very first night, he’d won us over, earned our trust and did the near impossible—made us believe once again that police officers were truly there to serve and protect.
Over the course of the next day or so, as we continued to exchange information with Billy, we realized that Treak had dug up many of the correct facts, but he’d picked up on the whisperings of his underground contacts and believed the mob party line about Billy being on the wrong side of the law.
“Explains why your name was on the list with that bastard Sebastian James,” Donovan said. “And why Sebastian said at the church that you were all on the same team.”
“Yes. I’m sure Treak Bradley would have gotten around to investigating me eventually, but it helped that I lived so far away. He was a good enough reporter that he might have discovered the truth and blown my cover.” Billy topped off his mug of coffee—I’d lost count of how many cups he’d had since yesterday, but it was probably close to twelve—and then he broke open a bag of pretzel sticks for us.
Holding his pretzel like a cigar, Donovan asked him about the sequence of events. “Where did Sebastian James and his cousin come in? And how did Bonner Mill play into everything?”
“From what we’ve figured,” Billy said, “Bonner Mill was first targeted because of a union labor dispute. It wasn’t a site Julian Carello had a hand in himself, but the Bonner family was an ally of his, and Leto probably offered his help in creating trouble for them. The second blast was the night Rick Brice killed Treak Bradley and that Rainwater kid.”
The cop paced to the window and back, rubbing some sweat away from his deep brown forehead and sighing. “We know Brice had been sent up to Wisconsin to deal with Treak. The journalist had gotten nosy and had hit too close to the truth about the source of the pipe bombs, tying it to the fireworks manufacturing and transportation. Knowing it would be easy for a shipment of fireworks to conceal the illegal explosives. By that time, Brice had already had to turn in his badge, but he was high up enough in the mob himself that he had a few cops in his pocket. Many were in Chicago, like Sebastian James, but also a few others scattered here and there, including a fellow by the name of Paul Earling, the police commander in Ashburn Falls.”
“Is that how Rick got the squad car that night?” I asked.
Billy nodded. “The population of Crescent Cove is too low for them to have their own police department, so they hire out officers from surrounding areas to patrol and investigate—like Earling. He was instrumental in ‘losing’ some critical evidence and paperwork in regards to both of the Bonner Mill explosions. He was most likely the cop who confiscated Gideon’s car and all of your brothers’ belongings at their motel in Ashburn Falls. One dirty cop in a small police department can do a lot of damage,” he said with disgust.
“Any chance some of those Crescent Cove and Ashburn Falls people are related?” Donovan suggested. “We knew that Ben Rainwater was the cousin of Ronny Lee Wolf, but was there any special connection between them and this Earling guy? Or between any of them and Hal the truck driver?”
“We’ve done a lot of checking into Earling’s background,” Billy said, crunching on a pretzel. “The three of them—Earling, Wolf and Chaney—weren’t relatives, but they were friends. We think that it was through knowing Earling that Hal Chaney got the job with Americana Trucking. And Ronny Lee Wolf was moonlighting at the fireworks factory. He was the one providing the extra explosive material in Chaney’s shipments. So all three of them were definitely working together.”
I finally reached for a pretzel stick. “So, Rick Brice came up to put a stop to Treak Bradley’s investigation, but he ended up finding out about Ronny’s cousin, Ben Rainwater, who was on to his relative’s bad deeds. And then both of our brothers showed up, too, and got themselves involved with Ben, Treak and this whole mess.”
“Exactly. Gideon and Jeremy were on the good side,” Billy said. “When they got away, it created a huge problem for Brice and Leto. That’s where Sebastian James came on the scene.”
Billy spent the next hour and a half bringing us up to speed on Sebastian, his background and his motivations. Started out a working-class city boy from a big family who’d gotten into a lot of scrapes with the law as a teen. But, like an atheist who’d finally found religion, Sebastian discovered the police academy and, for a while, pursued it with fervor. Worked his way up to lieutenant.
Only the zeal began to wear off after a while, and the extra perks he could get by cozying up to Rick Brice and his mob buddies began to outshine the luster of his badge. He took some bribes under the table, looked the other way more than once and wasn’t above fudging a few documents when required.
When word reached him that the two witnesses who’d gotten away were Minnesota boys from Crescent Cove, though, he knew he’d hit payday. Sebastian got himself a meeting with Leto and proudly told the mob boss that he had a connection there. His younger cousin, William James, was on the force in that little town and, with some cash to grease the wheel, good ole Willie could be “persuaded” to help them out.
I found myself hating Officer William James with every single fiber of my being. Even more than I had during his phony “investigation” of Gideon and Jeremy’s disappearance.
Billy must have seen the steam coming out of my ears because he was quick to try to reassure me. “Don’t worry, Aurora, we’re going to get him. We’ve only been holding out because we’re hoping to snag some of the bigger fish, too. Truth is, the extent of William James’s involvement was part of what we didn’t know for sure until after you and Donovan started following the trail your brother had set up in the journal.”
I needed him to explain that. “Are you saying the journal is something you and the FBI were involved in writing, as well as my brother?”
“No, that was all Gideon’s idea. He told me he couldn’t figure out how it was that he and Jeremy were tailed to Amarillo. They’d hidden out in St. Louis for a couple of weeks, just waiting to hear the news reports. At the time, they were most worried that they were going to be wanted in connection for that second Bonner Mill blast, but the story didn’t even make a blip on the news. The few reports they found attributed it to a furnace explosion. They got ahold of some local Minnesota newspapers and discovered the only things out on them were missing persons reports. People with information were supposed to call the police. Since they didn’t know how much danger they were still in and they didn’t want to put the lives of their families in jeopardy, they called William James.”
Donovan swore under his breath.
“Then Officer James, who’d already covered up any evidence that might have led to the police tracking our brothers to Crescent Cove,” I said, “called his cousin and let Sebastian know where they were.”
“That’s right,” Billy said. “Gideon had explained to William James that he and Jeremy didn’t really know what they’d stumbled onto but that it was a major operation. They wanted to make sure the few members of the Chameleon Lake Police Department protected their parents and siblings. They asked the officer to let their families know they were okay, but to keep their reappearance quiet until they were sure they really weren’t being followed. They told him about driving Ben’s car and gave William James enough information to initiate a real investigation of the Bonner Mill explosion. Your brothers also said they’d call again in a couple of weeks to check in on how everything was going from his side. To see if it would be safe to return.”
Donovan took out his anger on a couple of pretzels but didn’t say anything.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Then Gideon and Jeremy told William James they were heading toward Texas because, in having the time to think about everything Treak had disclosed to them, there were some hot spots along the way—Joplin and Amarillo, for instance. Places to which the journalist had told them he was following truck shipments. So, they wanted to check these cities out for themselves. And, knowing what they did
about explosives, they also wanted to see if they could figure out from talking to the locals what was really going on with them. You can imagine how much the mob wanted that. But your brothers were friendly and resourceful. They were good at getting information. Somewhere along the way, they ran into Hal Chaney and tried to talk some sense into him. Tried to be heroes and bring him back from the dark side.”
“But he went in the other direction,” Donovan said. “Wanted to blackmail the mob into giving him more money.”
“You got it.” The cop reached to refill his coffee mug yet again and muttered, “One of these days, I’ll stop living on caffeine and snack food.” He rifled around in a cabinet until he found his stash of Girl Scout cookies. “But not today.”
Billy told us much, much more after that, confirming details we already knew to be true—that Sebastian James and Rick Brice hunted down our brothers in Amarillo and were responsible for burning up Hal’s truck. That Sebastian killed the foolish man who was driving it, then he murdered Jeremy and shot at Gideon.
The Albuquerque cop also explained something we didn’t know, that Gideon was the one responsible for killing Rick Brice.
“Sebastian said that Gideon ‘did a number on Rick.’ Those were his exact words. He never said anything about my brother killing him,” I said.
And even though I knew what a piece of scum Rick Brice must have been, I couldn’t help but hurt for my brother. Feel his shock at what he’d had to do. Gideon had a laidback, peace-loving soul. As a kid, he’d had a contradictory streak—imagining himself as a superhero or a battleship commander or a proud Marine like our dad—but he hadn’t ever really wanted to harm anyone. He was a lover not a fighter.
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 31