by Sienna Blake
I blinked. Was this what this meeting was about? Had my guilt forced me to jump to the wrong conclusions?
I realized I was still sitting in stunned silence when Espinoza spoke instead of me. “We questioned Giovanni and Roman Tyrell, as well as a few of their men. They all alibied each other out. So far we can’t find any holes in their alibis. The only thing we have is the traffic cam video showing one of their SUVs in the area during the time.”
“That’s purely circumstantial. It’s not enough.” My father growled and leaned back in his chair, the hinges protesting. “What about witnesses?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. No one had found out about Roman and me. Yet, a small voice in me whispered.
I cleared my throat and spoke up. “We’ve canvassed the area around the body dump but no one saw anything. Or at least if they did, they’re not speaking to us.”
“Any trace on the body?”
I let out an easier breath. “No trace. Whoever committed the crime was a pro and knew to clean up and wear gloves.”
“And the slug?”
“It’s not a match to anything in the system. We haven’t found the gun. Uniforms have searched all the dumpsters in a three mile radius to the body dump.”
“We won’t find the gun. Even if we do these bastards are too smart to have it lead back to anyone.” My father swore. He rarely swore in front of me. He leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, and rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m getting pressure from upstairs to stamp out gang activity, which means putting Giovanni and Roman Tyrell away. We haven’t been able to pin anything else on them. This murder is our best chance.”
“What if,” I spoke up, “what if it wasn’t the Tyrells?”
I felt all three sets of eyes focus on me, burning holes in me. I regretted my words immediately.
My father’s lips pressed together. “Don’t be stupid, Julianna. Jacob Tyrell was killed two weeks ago by the Veronesis. Now one of Veronesi’s men has turned up dead. Of course, the Tyrells were behind this kill. If they didn’t pull the trigger, then they hired the man who did. This has the potential to lead to a full-scale war. When that happens, too many innocents will get pulled into it, they always do. We cannot let this escalate. We need to find some way of pinning the Tyrells for this murder.”
I frowned. “What about Jacob Tyrell’s murder? Shouldn’t we be focusing on that case as well?”
My father stared at me. “That is not your case.”
I bit down a rise of annoyance. “If these two cases are related, it might help us to have a look at the case file for Jacob Tyrell’s murderer.”
My father shook his head. “I already have people sifting through that evidence. There’s a hell of a lot of it. Your job is to focus on putting Giovanni and Roman Tyrell away. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Espinoza and I said together.
My father directed his next comment straight at me. “Don’t disappoint me.”
My stomach tightened. “I won’t, sir.”
“Good. Now get out of here and find me something to pin on those Tyrell bastards.”
I was silent as Espo and I walked out of my father’s office. Why was my father so determined to pin the Tyrells for Vinnie’s murder? We had no evidence they’d done it. My father was instigating a witch-hunt to try to bring down all the Tyrells.
What if Roman wasn’t like the rest of them?
“Look past the last name I was given. You know me.”
* * *
Later that night, I tossed the empty Chinese takeout box into the trash can by my desk and stood up, stretching, nodding goodnight to a fellow officer as he walked past me towards the elevator. I scanned the empty workstations and darkened offices. Perfect. I was the last one on the floor. What I wanted to do, I didn’t want to do while worrying that someone might be looking over my shoulder.
I pulled my chair under the desk and opened an internet browser. Glancing around myself one more time, I typed in “Roman Giovanni Tyrell” and clicked search before I could change my mind.
The search results came up in an instant. There were articles from various social magazines about the European heiresses and trust fund babes he’d been connected with. I cast my eyes over the various photos of him at parties, in clubs, on yachts, a bottle in one hand, the other slung around a bevy of beautiful girls. My heart squeezed. Was I just another one of his revolving door of girls? How many more of them had he invited to Paris with him? And if he was used to dating heiresses, what had he been doing with me?
I closed the browser, a growing sick feeling in my stomach. I opened an email I’d received from an old colleague who was working for Interpol in Lyon, France.
Good to hear from you, Julianna.
Here’s everything we have on Roman Tyrell.
Jerome.
I opened the attachments. While Roman Tyrell had been in Europe he hadn’t been linked to any of the European Mafia families. He had been picked up no less than five times for drunk and disorderly behavior, and disturbing the peace, all of them from bar fights. He had a string of speeding tickets. Nothing more serious than that. Drinking, speeding and fighting. How had he graduated from drunken fist fights to torture and cold-blooded murder?
I found the witness statements to the fights and read through them. I frowned. They had all claimed that Roman had been defending himself or someone else. According to the gossip columns, Roman was the one who was supposed to have started the fights. He even bragged about it in an interview. Why would he do that? Why would he make himself appear worse than he was?
He’d been enrolled in a Criminal Law Degree at the Regent University, located in the green heart of Regent’s Park in London.
Criminal law. How ironic.
He’d pulled out of his degree the day of his return to Verona with only one semester to go. As far as I could see, he hadn’t transferred to another university closer to home. Why did he just quit like that?
I searched back through public records from before he left for Europe. He had attended St. Andrews Private School, Verona’s most prestigious high school. I had gone to the local public school and was a grade below him. Our circles would never have crossed paths, not until last Saturday.
I couldn’t get access to Roman’s school records without a court order, but I did have access to the files kept by the school police. He had a few reprimands in his record: truancy, fighting, problems with authority figures.
I sank back into my chair. To the world, Roman Tyrell looked like a violent, irresponsible playboy. I remembered the man I had spent the night with: charming, funny, insightful. The Roman that the world seemed to think existed wasn’t the Roman that I had experienced. How could it be possible that the world got it so wrong?
“My father is a difficult man.”
I pulled up the file on Roman’s father. Giovanni Tyrell, known Mafia boss, controller of the Tyrell empire, suspected of running drugs and guns from Colombia, his illegal activities covered up by his legitimate interests: property investments, clubs, restaurants and transportation companies. There was a suspected string of dead bodies in his wake, but with no convictions.
I chewed on my lip. Roman’s mother’s murder case file would be in our system. It would have been before our files were digitized so it’d be stored in the file room down in the basement. I wasn’t about to check out the files from the file room. I searched for newspaper articles online instead.
Maria Tyrell, Wife of Mobster, Murdered.
She’d been discovered by their housekeeper in her garage with her throat slit. No weapon was found at the scene.
My heart skipped a beat when I read the next few lines. Roman Tyrell, her youngest son, was discovered hiding in the corner of the garage covered in her blood. He may have been the only witness. He’d been treated for shock but was otherwise unharmed. He had been twelve.
Jesus Christ. I imagined a young Roman finding his mother dead in the garage. My heart cried for him. That was somet
hing no child, no human, should ever have to go through.
I would have been eleven. Old enough to remember. How did I not remember this? This was huge news.
I looked at the date of the newspaper articles. Of course. This was the same time as my mother had died so I’d fallen into a deep grief-hole where nothing else had penetrated. Fourteen years ago, Roman Tyrell and I were on opposite sides of the city, living in two different worlds, yet struggling with the same grief.
I kept reading further, my stomach twisting into knots. Roman Tyrell hadn’t told the police anything. He’d refused to speak to them even after the case went cold.
It had been a gang-related hit, the newspapers mused. Others, were more sensational.
Did Roman Tyrell Kill His Own Mother?
My stomach turned as I read, unable to stop. Police believed that Roman Tyrell held the key to solving his mother’s murder. Why wouldn’t Roman speak up? Was he protecting someone? Or was he the one hiding the violent secret? Like father, like son.
I swallowed my anger down. How could the papers even speculate that a twelve-year-old boy could do something like this? Roman Tyrell had not even been a teenager before this city began to persecute him, all because of who his father was.
What about Maria Tyrell? Roman spoke of a gentle, kind woman when he spoke about her. I stared at a black and white photo of Maria. Her thick dark hair was a wave that tumbled over her shoulders, framing a sweetheart face. She had been a beautiful lady with a wide warm smile; the same smile as Roman’s. My heart clenched.
I dug through the digital records and found the file on the massacre at the docks where Jacob Tyrell, Roman’s brother, had been slain. The “dirty docks massacre”, the newspapers had called it. I glanced around, making sure I was still alone before I began to click through the crime scene photographs. A single gunshot wound on each body, a V slashed into each of their chests. It had been without a doubt a professional hit.
Except for Jacob.
Jacob Tyrell, wanted for murder and gone underground for four years, had been found dead in a converted apartment on the top floor of one of the buildings. There was a V on his chest like the others, but he’d also taken a beating before he had died. An entire clip of bullets had been released into his torso and he had a stab wound to his leg. It had been personal. It left no doubt that the massacre had occurred to target Jacob.
So much violence. How much blood could a man’s life be bathed in before the darkness began to soak into his soul?
Roman’s words to me kept echoing in my brain. “My family is…complicated. I didn’t want to be a part of it. I wanted to be my own person.”
This was why Roman had left Verona all those years ago. This was why he wanted to return to London after his brother’s funeral. But he hadn’t returned to Europe. He stayed in Verona. Why had he changed his mind? Had he given up trying to fight his family legacy?
Or was there some other reason?
Maybe we were looking at this wrong. Maybe, it wasn’t his father who was lying for Roman, but Roman who was lying for his father.
I slipped into the empty tech room. One side of the room was covered in large monitors, a curved control station with more buttons, panels and keyboards than a spaceship command center. I had spent hours in here beside the techies, scouring through traffic cameras around Vinnie’s dump site. I knew how to handle the controls, at least enough to be able to access the city’s traffic camera footage. If I could somehow trace Roman’s steps from the hotel to wherever he went that night, maybe I could prove that he hadn’t been with his father. Maybe I could tear his father’s alibi apart.
In the interview, Roman had said that his friend Mercutio had picked him up and dropped him off at his father’s. From a DMV search of Mercutio Brevio, I knew that he had a black Ford Taurus registered to him. I wrote his license plate number on a piece of paper beside me.
I couldn’t see which way Roman had left the hotel. We hadn’t gotten the security tapes from the Marriott Hotel yet as we were still waiting on a court order. Assuming Roman had been headed to the airport, they would have turned right out of the hotel. I pulled up a map on the city’s traffic cameras on one monitor and then located one that I suspected might have caught a glimpse of him.
I lined up the time to seven ten p.m. that Sunday, just as Roman would have been saying goodbye to me. And hit play. The seconds ticked over as I stared at the grainy screen, eyeing the various cars that passed the intersection. I spotted what looked like a Ford Taurus and hit pause. I leaned in towards the screen. I could see two figures in the front seats. When I zoomed in I could make out their faces. I recognized Roman’s wide shoulders in the passenger seat. I pressed play again and watched as they drove off-screen. I turned back to the map of traffic cameras, picked out the next camera that they might pass and lined that footage up.
The work was painstaking, but I was able to follow the Ford Taurus towards the outskirts of Verona. I frowned. They really were headed to the airport. So why didn’t Roman catch his flight?
In the footage from a freeway camera mounted high on an overpass, I spotted several SUVs converging around the Ford. My skin began to prickle. One of the SUVs sped up beside Mercutio’s vehicle, then veered in front of the car to block it. The Taurus braked and skidded to a halt. A second SUV blocked the back of it. The few other cars on the road braked before merging into the left lane to get around the road blockage.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
A man got out of the front SUV. I paused it and zoomed in, squinting at his face. My eyes widened when I saw the scar cutting across his left side. Scarface. The man from the cemetery.
He had a gun in his hand.
I zoomed out and hit play. The passenger door of the Taurus opened and Roman stepped out of the car. Seeing him, even in black and white, caused something to tug in my chest. A limo drove up in the left lane and stopped beside them. Scarface pointed his gun towards Roman. I watched in disbelief as Roman got into the back of the limo. Scarface got into the front. The convoy drove off.
Roman had been kidnapped. By whom? Who were these men? Who was Scarface?
Did something happen to Roman to get him involved with Vinnie? Why did his father claim that they were having dinner?
I ran the license plate of the black limo. The hairs on my arms rose when I read the registration details.
Tyrell Industries.
Giovanni Tyrell had kidnapped Roman on the way to the airport. But why?
I followed the convoy through the traffic cameras. I lost them soon after they turned off the highway. I sank back into my chair.
“I’m running away from my father.”
What if Roman didn’t want to live the life his family did? What if that’s why he left Verona? What if Vinnie’s murder was something Roman got pulled into?
“Julianna, you’re still here?” Captain Foster poked his head through the partially open door. I jumped and clicked the minimize button on the screen. The traffic camera footage disappeared.
I turned to face him. I hoped from his angle at the door he hadn’t been able to see what was on the screen properly. “Yes, captain. I was just running through a hunch.”
He stepped farther into the room. “Did you find anything?”
I shook my head. “Nothing interesting,” I lied. I couldn’t tell the captain about my theory on Roman Tyrell. Not yet.
He glanced at the blank screen, then looked back at me, his face unreadable. “Are you leaving soon?”
“In a bit.”
He shook his head and gave me an affectionate smile. “You’re like your father. You work too hard.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Thanks. I think.”
“It is a compliment. I’m waiting for the day that you surpass me in rank. Anyway, good night. Make sure you get some sleep.”
As soon as the captain left, I sagged with relief. I had to be more careful. I opened up the traffic camera footage again and stared at the screen.
What was going on? Who are you really, Roman Tyrell? What happened with your father?
“My father is a difficult man. My family is…complicated. We have a family business and the politics… The politics are killer. I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
What if Giovanni did kill Vinnie, or at the very least, had Vinnie killed? Perhaps all Roman was guilty of was lying about being his father’s alibi. How would I prove this?
Roman.
Roman was my proof.
* * *
The next evening, I stood in front of my closet looking across the items in my wardrobe. I needed to be sexy without being obvious. My eyes were drawn to a dress in a deep red.
He let out a groan. “You’re wearing red lacy underwear?” His voice came out tight, almost pained. “Please tell me the bra matches.”
My cheeks heated. Red. Roman liked me in red. I pulled the dress out and slipped it on, a red fitted dress with buttons running the whole way up the front. I slipped on a pair of nude heels and stepped in front of the mirror. It held on to the lines of my curves without being too clingy, and if I left the top button undone, you could see the peak of the top of my cleavage. It was perfect.
Except there was no place to hide a gun.
The thought of walking into enemy camp without a gun made me feel…naked. A shiver slipped down my spine like a melting ice cube. Did I really think that Roman could be dangerous to me?
No.
At least, not physically. My heart skipped a beat as if to make a point. A point which I summarily ignored. I grabbed my keys, Roman’s address which I had copied from his file, and left before I could change my mind.