The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “How did he die?”

  “Someone shoved a serrated blade into his throat and left him in a Dumpster.”

  He considered that. “What was his name?”

  “John McTavish.”

  He couldn’t exactly dismiss the idea that this murder would have been related to his business. He must have been sifting through recent events to see if John’s name rang a bell. Perhaps one of his captains had turned in an activity report to HQ to that effect. “I had no business with a John McTavish. I have no business in Boston. I did not kill him.”

  “He had no business with you either.” I pointed to Vanessa. “She did it and blamed it on you.”

  Vanessa didn’t even wait to be asked. “I killed no one, Poppy. Jimmy killed him. I warned you not to do business with him. It was a disagreement over parts. I have nothing to do with airplane parts, as you know. It is a filthy business.”

  Ottavio nodded to Arturo. The big man walked over and I thought my legs might give out right there because he placed the barrel of his large caliber automatic weapon against my right temple. The air that was in my lungs got stuck there. I couldn’t get it out. I couldn’t blink. I felt the cold barrel against my head and I couldn’t move anything.

  “Hold on,” Jack said. “Wait.”

  “No one speaks unless I ask you.” Ottavio moved in very close to me. My head began to pound and my eyes to throb in rhythm with the blood hammering in my ears. The closer he came, the harder everything throbbed. “Are you lying to me?”

  Jack tried to take a step toward us. One of the thugs raised his weapon and the other yanked him back.

  I made myself maintain eye contact, hoping to convince Ottavio with the power of the truth. “I’m not lying. John was killed because he threatened to expose Jimmy’s parts operation. Vanessa couldn’t have that, so she killed him. Or she had him killed.”

  “Es verdad, Valentina?”

  “Losing the stations would have been inconvenient, Poppy, but of little consequence to me. I have many other options.” I could hear the calculations running in Vanessa’s voice as she went through her high-speed emergency damage control. “And she’s lying about this man from Boston. He found out Jimmy was stealing from us, Poppy. That’s why Jimmy killed him. Jimmy killed him, and brought unwelcome scrutiny as a result. It brought these two. And he was stealing from us. He was our problem, Poppy. And I solved it.”

  Ottavio had no problem maintaining eye contact. “There is your answer.”

  “My friend had nothing to do with bad parts or drugs or anything else. He was a man with a family who came down here to try to put something right. He threatened to upset her plan to take revenge on you. That’s why she had to kill him.”

  “Poppy, she would say anything right now to save herself.”

  Ottavio kept his eyes on me. “Tell me about this plan.”

  “Please remove this gun. I can’t… I can’t talk… I can’t even think with it pointed at my head.”

  He glanced at Arturo and I felt the gun pressing harder against my temple, closer to my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut. “Your daughter,” I said, and stopped. No air. I couldn’t make the words come out. I knew what to say and couldn’t make them come out. “Your daughter… is a government informant. She’s…” There was only one thought in my head now. No room for any others. A tear squeezed out of the corner of my eye and ran down my cheek. Every muscle contracted and at the moment when I thought I was going to die… I wondered who was going to call the movers.

  The gun fell away. I opened my eyes to find that Arturo had stepped back. A flood of delayed… something… rolled through me. Delayed stress. The room started to spin. I found Jack’s eyes, looked at him looking at me, and I saw something there to hold on to. I centered my breathing and tried to get the world back in focus.

  Ottavio’s eyes had narrowed ever so slightly. His head was canted toward Vanessa, but he was still looking at me. “What did you say?”

  “I said your daughter is an informant for the government.”

  “What agency?”

  “The FBI. She’s been helping them build a case against you. She couldn’t let John turn Jimmy in. If he went, the stations went. If the stations went, so did she, and the federal case against you would have blown up. She couldn’t let that happen. She wants to see you in jail.”

  “Vanessa’s the one who has been stealing from you,” Jack said. “We can prove it.”

  The disc. I’d forgotten about the disc and Jack was reminding me and thank God for his presence of mind. “We have documentation of all of your accounts,” I said. “How much was taken from where and where she’s got it all stashed. I came here today to trade it for Felix. I’ll give it to you. It will prove what we’re saying.”

  “Who is Felix?”

  “He’s… he’s just a kid who was trying to help us out. She took him, too.”

  Ottavio walked over to his daughter and reached out to her. She shrank from his touch, and it occurred to me she had just failed a test. “Valentina, do you still hate me so much?”

  “Poppy, I will open up my accounts to you and let you see that I have never taken a cent.” She started moving back, stumbling over one of the many items left strewn about by the crashing workbenches. “I have done a good job for you. I would never steal from you. I have all the money I need.” She kept moving until she was blocked from behind by one of the heavier pieces of the aircraft. She pressed back against it, thinking perhaps she could move the obstacle through the sheer force of her will. It was how she had moved every other obstacle in her life—all but the one standing in front of her.

  “Tell him,” she commanded, glaring in her brother’s direction. Arturo was a sphinx. “I said tell him, Arturo.”

  Ottavio approached her slowly. “He did tell me. He told me everything.” This time when he reached for her she had no place to go. He drew in a deep breath as he let his fingertips stroke her hair. His voice was quiet. “I sent him to watch over you, Valentina. And he has been watching.”

  She clenched both arms across her stomach and bent at the waist. “You were supposed to take care of me, Arturo. You were sent to protect me.” When she straightened, Vanessa Cray was no longer svelte and elegant. She was skinny and drawn. Her clothes seemed to hang on her in a different way. It wasn’t just her facial expression that had changed. Her facial features seemed different. The shape of her eyes when she looked at her father, the fullness of her lips, the way the muscles in her face moved—they transformed her, or perhaps returned her to what I could now see was her natural state. With her father, she was still the terrified, brutalized teenager he had abandoned to a horrible fate.

  “Did you think I could forgive you, Poppy?” Mascara stained tears streamed down her face. “Did you think I could ever forgive you?”

  Ottavio was unmoved. “I never asked your forgiveness. Only your loyalty and respect.”

  “Loyalty?” She heaved back against the fuselage, perhaps trying to move out of his reach. When it didn’t move, she turned that force on her father. “You arrogant, selfish bastard. I was chained in a closet for six days. Where was your loyalty to me? Where was your respect for me?” She banged her chest so hard it must have hurt.

  “I have explained all of this to you. If you could not accept my decision, then you should never have come to work for me. You made a choice.”

  “You ruined me, Poppy. You wrecked me. You destroyed my life. I died in that closet. I was seventeen years old and I was already dead and the only thing that gave me reason to live was the thought of hurting you. Of making you pay for all that you took from me.” She was moving, stalking back and forth. If her nails could have grown a couple of inches, I was sure they would have, the better to tear into his flesh. “I thought about having you killed. I could have done it. I know the ways to get to you. But you wouldn’t have suffered enough. I wanted you in prison. I wanted you to be raped, Poppy. To be held down by someone stronger than you and forced to submit to hi
s will.”

  Dressed in that red suit, she seemed like one big force of pure hatred. She launched herself at her father. Ottavio’s bodyguards, including Arturo, started to go to his aid, but he stopped them with a loud, barking command. He grabbed Vanessa’s upper arms as she struggled against him. When she couldn’t use her fists, she tried to kick him. She wrenched and pulled and twisted for a long time. He let her fight. When she was spent, she sank to her knees on the ground in front of him and cried like a child with her head bowed. “Why didn’t you come for me?” She reached out for her father’s hand, took it in the two of hers, and laid her cheek against it. “Poppy, why did you not want me back?”

  He bent down and pulled her up to her feet and into his arms. “Everything is all right,” he whispered. He took her face in both of his hands and kissed her fully on the lips. It was a long, lingering, tender, creepy kiss.

  Ottavio took a step back. Vanessa straightened. She was a wreck. As she wiped her tears and brushed the damp hair from her face, Arturo raised his gun hand and placed the barrel against her head.

  If her father gave a signal, I didn’t see it. What I saw in her last moment of life was that she closed her eyes, and then opened them. She was looking at me. I thought she started to smile. The gun exploded. The shock of the blast snapped my head back. I saw the bullet erupt from the other side of her head, and with it a fountain of blood. Her body dropped as if her bones had turned to lead. She fell on her back with her eyes to the ceiling. They were open.

  The warehouse was completely still. Ottavio, Arturo, Jack, the two goons, and I made six people, but I couldn’t hear a sound. I smelled the gun, the cordite stench. I was aware that Ottavio was looking at us, maybe even talking to us. I was aware of the sound of a helicopter overhead again. But I was staring at Vanessa, at her startled eyes, her interrupted skull, and the growing circle of blood on the floor. It looked like an extension of her bright red suit, as if her body were melting into a pool of blood. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Blood to blood.

  The noise from the helicopter grew louder, the loudest one yet, and I didn’t even hear the big garage doors rolling open behind us. All I saw was a phalanx of men surging through the door. They were dressed in black with helmets and masks and carrying big weapons, screaming.

  “Down… down… DOWN—”

  “…weapons down…”

  “On the ground… now.”

  My hands flew straight over my head without any conscious direction from me. Someone came up from behind. I felt the rough force of the heel of his hand between my shoulder blades, shoving me to the ground.

  “Spread your legs. Hands behind your head.”

  I did as I was told and lay there frozen with one cheek mashed into the concrete, looking over at Jack, who was in the same position. Whatever panic I had managed to subdue until that moment came rushing over me in wave after wave of violent shivers. I was convinced that the slightest unexpected move would cause a chain reaction, that I might have survived the Colombian drug lord only to be killed by the good guys. I assumed they were good guys.

  The commandos swarmed around us, guns drawn, shouting to be heard over the oppressive racket of the still hovering helicopter. I caught sight of a second group coming through the door, six people dressed in blue jeans, wind-breakers, and baseball caps. Some had holsters strapped to their legs. This group seemed alert, but not on testosterone overload, and I started to feel that maybe I wouldn’t be accidentally annihilated for sneezing.

  The sound of the helicopter began to dissipate as it must have moved off from a position directly overhead. I started to pick out individual voices again.

  “She’s all right.” It was a woman’s voice, and it was familiar. “Let her up.”

  Someone reached down and helped me to my feet. I had to take a few seconds to reorient to an upright view of the world. The warehouse that had seemed so massive before was now teeming.

  “Alex.”

  It was that voice again. I turned around. A woman approached. She wore the dark windbreaker and the jeans and a long blonde ponytail that came out of the back of her cap. I stared. She laughed. It was… it was… Margie? George Speath’s secretary?

  “I’m Agent Laubert.”

  “You’re who?”

  “Susan Laubert. George is over there.”

  She pointed toward Vanessa’s body. His back was to me, but it was impossible not to recognize George’s bulky shape, and for the first time I noticed the big yellow letters stenciled across the back of the windbreakers. DEA. George was DEA. George and Margie. DEA.

  Jack was getting to his feet. He was bleeding from a small cut over his right eye but otherwise seemed fine. I walked over and put my arms around his waist and tried to disappear in his arms. I wanted to cry, but my eyes were too wide. They wouldn’t close. I felt dried up.

  George was cheery when he saw me. “Hi, Alex. You seem to be in one piece.”

  “Felix,” I said. I was unable to get any of the thoughts out of my head in a coherent manner save that one. “We have to find Felix.”

  “Felix is fine,” George said. “We had to pick him up earlier this afternoon. It was for his own good. We’ve got him back at the office debriefing.”

  “You picked him up?” The woman in the room next door had seen Felix picked up by two men and a tall blonde. I looked across the hangar at Margie. Tall and blonde.

  “Smart kid,” George said. “And boy can he talk. We might have to hire him just to keep control of him.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Agent George Weir.” He held out his big hand to me and smiled. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  George stood on the tarmac around the back of Speath Aviation. I stood next to him admiring the old Electra. “What about that whole story you told me about your father running the company?”

  “This company was run by a man named Howard Speath. He got into some trouble with us, of the money laundering nature. As a way of staying out of prison, he offered the use of his business as a cover. We’d heard about the inroads Ottavio was making down here in his laundering activities, so we decided to set up the operation.”

  “You’ve been running his business for two years?”

  He couldn’t suppress a satisfied smile. “I made more money in that time than Howard did in the five years before that. I got them back in the black, strengthened their balance sheet.”

  “That shot of Ottavio’s dirty cash must have helped a lot.”

  He shrugged. “I could have done it even without the dirty cash. I could have gotten a bank loan.”

  He probably could have, too. George had turned out to be quite an impressive guy. “And Marg—Susan was part of the whole thing?”

  “She’s my backup. We had to teach her to type.”

  “Did you set up the operation to get Vanessa?”

  “Ottavio by way of Vanessa. We’d tried to get her before in New York, and she always managed to wriggle out. It was Damon Hollander tipping her off. After we shifted our investigation down here, this Damon kid popped up again and we figured out what was going on. We decided not to bring the FBI in. Actually, I insisted. I wasn’t about to have my cover blown by some snot-nosed kid bucking for a promotion.”

  “What happened with Damon?”

  “As near as we can tell, he was working on the task force in New York that was investigating a money laundering ring down in Panama. He started watching Vanessa. One thing led to another and she came up with this scheme to get Ottavio. He was more than happy to oblige. He worked it—it’s more accurate to say that she worked it out so that she got off the hook on that deal. They all got off the hook. Damon set up a formal relationship where she was his informant and he was her handler. She refused to work with anyone but him. Not too many people knew about it, even within the Bureau.”

  “Did Damon know she had John killed?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “What
’s going to happen to him?”

  “The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility is very interested in talking to him.”

  “I don’t understand why they killed John if he was going home.”

  “He was a good guy, your friend. He thought it over. He talked to his brother, and he came back to Damon and told him he wanted to stay and help.”

  “He wasn’t going home?”

  “He knew these boys were dealing in dirty parts and wanted to stop them. He trusted his brother to watch over his family. He told Damon he would stay, wear a wire. Whatever they needed.”

  That sounded like John. All the strength—and the weakness—that had made him who he had been. Mae would understand what happened. She wouldn’t like it or agree with his decision, but at least she would now understand. She could make sense of it. And Terry would be happy to know that John had trusted him with the most precious thing in his life. His family.

  “Did Vanessa provide any confidential information to Damon, or did it all go the other way?”

  “She provided a lot of information to Damon, always in favor of Ottavio and against his competitors. He made some big busts up in New York. Down here too, from what I understand.”

  “And then she turned on Ottavio?”

  “I think that was her plan right from the start. She was a good girl long enough to build up her bank account and his trust. Once she was set, she got Damon to start working on a plan to reel him in. But things started spinning out of control pretty fast. First Jimmy went and stole the airplane. Damon had that more or less handled until John showed up. And then you. She never counted on all that.”

  “And she never counted on her brother being a spy, I bet.”

  “Arturo was her half-brother. She thought Ottavio had sent him up here after the kidnapping to watch over her. What he was really doing all these years was watching the money. Arturo figured out that Vanessa was skimming. He told Colombia, and Ottavio came up so he could kill her himself. This is what we’re hearing, anyway. He figured if he made an example out of his own daughter, no one would ever try to steal from him again.”