“No,” I said. “Let’s start with the first one, okay? Work forward.”
He didn’t react other than to nod and slide the Harrison papers back into the folder.
10
__________
The four offenders who’d worked with the Cantrells at their strange home in the woods near Hinckley had all been sentenced for violent crimes. Three had been convicted of murder, another for armed robbery and assault.
The couple’s first hire was a Serb named Mark Ruzity, who’d grown up in the Slavic Village on Cleveland’s east side. It was a damn hard neighborhood. At one time Ruzity had a bright future. A blues guitarist of some renown, he’d been featured in a few newspaper and magazine articles after landing gigs with national acts. Ken had copies of those stories, glimpses of what could have been. Ruzity’s success had always been short-lived, though; his drug problems limited his career. He bottomed out in New Orleans while touring with a band called Three Sheiks to the Wind, attacking an audience member who sat in the front of the club and talked loudly during the performance. Ruzity’s luck was poor—not only did he break a good guitar on the gentleman’s back, but it turned out his victim was an off-duty cop. That incident landed him in jail for six months, and when he got out he was broke and bandless.
After returning to Cleveland, Ruzity got a job in construction and began playing again, mostly in local bars and for little money. For more than a year he held it together, until he met a leggy redhead named Valerie after a gig one night. She was beautiful, he was stoned, and by morning he was in love. There was just one problem: Valerie was a prostitute.
He didn’t remember paying her that night, though he apparently had, and when she informed him the relationship had been strictly professional, he viewed it not as a deal-breaker but as a challenge. The Montagues and the Capulets. After a day of brooding, with a few black beauties and some gin to clear his head, Ruzity determined there was only one way this mess could be sorted out: He murdered her pimp.
The beautiful romantic vision came to a fast and painful end when Valerie herself turned him in. The bad news was that he’d just been caught for murder; the good news was that he’d murdered a pimp with a record. The sentencing judge went easy, and Ruzity spent fifteen years in prison, writing songs and studying the blues. He had no living family and no close friends, and the state’s department of rehabilitation placed him in a job with Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell, who had some ideas about offender reentry that seemed worth a try.
Ruzity lived and worked with them for six months before moving back into the city, where he made a living repairing instruments at a pawnshop and teaching guitar lessons.
The second parolee who found his way to Whisper Ridge was Nimir Farah, who’d used a machete in an attempt to murder his own cousin over a suspected affair with Farah’s girlfriend. Farah had immigrated to the United States only two years earlier, fleeing a desperate situation in his home country, Sudan. He’d come to Columbus to live with a cousin who’d arrived years earlier on a student visa and was the last living member of Farah’s family, or at least the last he’d been able to keep track of as war and famine swept Sudan.
It was thanks only to an exceptional emergency room surgeon that the cousin survived, a point made emphatically clear by the prosecuting attorney in the trial transcript Ken had photocopied. The charge was attempted murder, and the sentence was twenty years in prison. Farah served ten, then managed to avoid a criminal deportation hearing when Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell stepped in. Ken had tracked down a letter from the couple arguing quite eloquently against deporting Farah to a dangerous country where he no longer had ties. Instead, he was given parole and a job at Whisper Ridge. He worked for the Cantrells for six months, then moved to Cleveland, where he finished the degree in environmental sciences he’d started while in prison. As of Ken’s last check, he was employed by a nonprofit that specialized in water sanitation issues—particularly the challenges faced in arid areas much like Farah’s homeland.
It seemed to be, once again, a striking success for the Cantrells.
I turned the last page of the Farah file over and found myself staring at a picture of Parker Harrison.
He’d been the third hire, and though I didn’t need to refresh myself on his background, I read through Ken’s notes anyhow. I wasn’t ready to disclose my knowledge of Harrison yet, and skipping over him would be a clear tip of my hand. So I pored over the old information, found nothing new, and then moved to the fourth and final hire, a man named Salvatore Bertoli, who’d been raised in an orphanage after his mother died following their immigration from Italy.
“A lot of different ethnicities passed through,” I said. “There a reason?”
“Yeah, that was the idea. Joshua was interested in culture and crime. It was a topic of a lot of the papers he wrote, and how he met Alexandra.”
I thought about that and tried to fit Parker Harrison into the mix. His mother had been Shawnee, and he’d told me that Alexandra Cantrell was fascinated by the stories he’d heard and what he knew of the culture.
“I’ll tell you something else about their boy Bertoli,” Ken said. “He’s Italian. As is, you might have heard, that Cosa Nostra thing to which brother Dominic is connected. Allegedly.”
“Merriman, you profiling bastard.”
He held his hands up. “Just making connections.”
“So you think Salvatore was imported by Dominic Sanabria, orphaned, framed for a crime, then paroled and tucked away at the sister’s house to steal back the dead father’s money?” I considered it and nodded. “Yeah, that works. Let’s call it a day.”
“I can tell you this, wise-ass—Bertoli had been arrested on two different occasions prior to the one he was finally convicted on. First was a car theft charge, second was assault. In both cases, the guys arrested with him were known associates of Dominic Sanabria.”
The smirk dried off my face. “You’re sure of that?”
“Positive. Arresting officers confirmed it for me. Said they were insignificant players—I believe he called them grunts—but that guy was an associate of Sanabria’s crew. No doubt about it.” Ken pointed at the file in my hands. “Interested now? Read on.”
I read on. Bertoli’s story was far and away the least interesting of the group. He’d beaten and then robbed the drug-pushing manager of a truck stop on I-71, who claimed Bertoli took cash, though when police apprehended him he had no cash but did have some heroin. Truck stops are among the less wise locations for crime. Lonely places along the highway that stay open all night tend to be paranoid about their security. One of the parking lot security cameras caught Bertoli, who was smart enough to wear a mask and use a stolen plate, but not smart enough to use a stolen car. He put the fake plate on his own car—a custom Impala featuring chrome rims with silver diamond cutouts, hardly the sort of thing that stands out. It took police under two hours to locate it and arrest him. Bertoli had a sidekick in the car at the time of the robbery, but it was no high-level mob player. Rather, his passenger was a kid whose name was redacted from the report because he was a juvenile. The arresting officer believed Bertoli had promised to sell the boy the heroin. He was sixteen years old.
The boy wouldn’t testify to Bertoli’s intent to sell, claiming he was just along for the ride and oblivious to the crime, which weakened the case. Although Bertoli—who was only twenty-three himself—already had three arrests, he didn’t have any convictions. He was offered a plea agreement sentence of five years, accepted, and served two and a half.
“Kind of a stiff sentence for somebody who beat up another guy just to take his drugs,” I said, “and odd that he didn’t want to take it to trial. Makes me wonder if—”
“They tried to get him to roll on somebody and he wouldn’t?” Ken said. “That he was scared of that sort of pressure, so he took the deal and did his time with his mouth shut to protect himself? Yeah, that was my idea, too—and where Sanabria figures in, maybe.”
“This pi
ece of criminal masterwork that got him busted hardly seems like a major mob play, though. He beats the shit out of some guy and steals a small amount of heroin so he can sell it to an underage kid? Doesn’t feel like Dominic Sanabria’s work.”
“I agree, but Bertoli was associated with those guys, and it makes sense that the prosecutor and the police would have tried to lean on him, doesn’t it?”
Yes, it did—but he’d taken his jail sentence instead of talking. Then, with just a few years of time behind him for a relatively mundane crime, he somehow became the next selection of the Cantrell rehabilitation effort. An effort that promptly went awry. Bertoli spent only three weeks on the property before leaving. When I saw Ken’s note on the date he left, I looked up from the file.
“Hey,” I said, and Ken turned his eyes away from the window as I held up the first sheet on Bertoli. “Is this accurate? The release date?”
“Yes.”
I frowned and lowered the sheet. “Harrison was still there. Is that a mistake?”
“No. Harrison was the first one to stay longer than six months. I have no idea why. Maybe they thought he wasn’t ready to move on. Maybe he was their favorite felon. I really have no idea. Anyway, he did his six months, stayed on, and then they brought Bertoli in, and the two of them lived there together briefly. Then Bertoli was killed, and the Cantrells took off.”
“He was murdered?”
“Officially, no. It’s listed as an accidental death. He somehow managed to tumble off the roof of a six-story building. Oops.”
He looked at me with a grim smile, and I dropped my eyes and went back to the file and read the details. Bertoli left the Cantrells abruptly, claiming to his parole officer that he was taking a job at a restaurant in Murray Hill, Cleveland’s version of Little Italy. He never logged a day of work at the restaurant, though. A few days after he left Whisper Ridge, Salvatore Bertoli fell off the roof of an abandoned warehouse he had no reason to be in, and Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell fell off the face of the earth.
“If there’s anything related to the Cantrells that feels wrong, it’s Bertoli,” Ken said.
He was right. Bertoli felt wrong.
“So let me ask you this,” Ken said. “If you’ve got this case, who of that group interests you the most?”
“On the basis of his connection to her brother and his strange demise, Bertoli,” I said. It was as complete a lie as I’d uttered in a while—Harrison interested me most, of course, but Ken’s paperwork history pointed in a different direction.
He nodded. “So it would seem, but the detective I talked with, guy named Graham, was interested in only one person out of that group: Parker Harrison.”
I was really hoping he’d say Ruzity.
“He tell you why?” I asked, thinking again of Harrison’s letters, how they’d started just after Joshua Cantrell’s bones were found.
“Nope. Was looking for information, not giving it out. He didn’t ask any specific questions about what I’d found on the other guys, though. Just Harrison.”
“The current detective? Guy who’s working on the Pennsylvania side, where the body was found?”
“That’s right. He was entirely focused on Harrison.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d been holding off on sharing my client’s identity with Ken because it felt like the right thing to do, but how honest was it? If I didn’t trust the guy enough to tell him that, then what in the hell was I doing offering my help to him? You had to pick a side, sooner or later.
I was quiet for a long time, and Ken was watching me with a touch of confusion, as if he didn’t know what I was brooding over.
“Last night you wanted to know my client’s name,” I said.
Ken nodded.
“Parker Harrison.”
He leaned forward, eyes wide. “You’re shitting me.”
I shook my head. “He’d written me letters for a few months, asking me to look into it, explaining his history to me. I threw them all out. Then he showed up in person and seemed reasonably sane and talked me into it. He didn’t mention that Cantrell’s body had been found. Once I learned that, I quit.”
“Did he know it had been found?”
“Yes. That’s what bothered me. It was like he was playing a game.”
“You think he could have murdered Cantrell?”
“I have no idea, but now you’ve got a better idea of why I wanted to stay out of this.”
“Did you talk to any cops about him?”
“No.”
He said, “Maybe you should. This guy I talked with, Graham.”
I didn’t answer.
“You say he was writing you letters for a few months?” Ken asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sounds pretty strange to me, Lincoln.”
“He sent the first one the week Cantrell’s body was discovered.”
Ken leaned back and spread his hands, a what-more-do-you-need gesture.
I looked down at the file, stared at Harrison’s photograph for a few seconds, then snapped the folder shut and tossed it on the desk.
“You got Graham’s number?”
I called from the office, with Ken listening to my half of the conversation. He didn’t hear much. I’d barely begun my explanation when Graham interrupted.
“He was writing you letters? Starting in December?”
“Yes.”
“You still have them?”
“No.”
“Damn it. That’s okay, though. That’s okay. You said you’re in Cleveland?”
“That’s right. Now I only—”
“About a two-hour drive,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “I have a few things to finish up, take maybe an hour, then I can head your way. You give me your address, I can be up there by two, two thirty at the latest.”
“I can tell you everything over the phone.”
“No, no. I’ll come up.”
So I gave him the address. When I hung up, Ken said, “Seem interested?”
“Enough to make a two-hour drive without even hearing the whole story,” I said, and that made Ken smile. Odd. I didn’t feel like smiling at all.
11
__________
Quinn Graham arrived just before two, and it didn’t take him long to make me feel like a fool. He was probably in his late thirties, black, with a shaved head and a thin goatee. Not tall but powerful, with heavy arms and a substantial chest.
“So Harrison explained in the first letter that he was a convicted murderer, and you chose not to keep that letter or any that followed it?” he asked about thirty seconds after exchanging greetings.
“That’s right.”
He didn’t shake his head or make a snort of disgust or a wiseass remark. He looked at me thoughtfully.
“Okay. Probably wanted to get it out of your sight. Is that it? Yeah, I don’t blame you for that, but I wish you’d held on to them. It’s a police thing, though. People with experience tend to be more concerned with potential evidence.”
“I know,” I said. “I used to be a police detective.”
“Oh?” he said and gave me more of that stare, as if he were thinking it was no real surprise that I wasn’t still a police detective.
“I remember the letters quite well, though,” I said, “and while I do wish I’d kept them, I’m not sure how much evidentiary value they would have offered.”
“We could have analyzed the language, given it to a profiler. Harrison might have even been crazy enough to incorporate some sort of code.”
All right, I was an idiot. What else to say? I waited for him.
“Well, they’re gone now,” he said. “Nothing to do about that.”
“Exactly.”
“You say you remember them well, so let’s hear what you remember.”
I took him through the sequence as best as I remembered it, offering approximate dates for the letters, describing each message. Then I told him about Harrison’s visit, the simplicity of his request, and the few
brief hours I’d invested into working his case.
“Now when you told him off and said you were done,” Graham said, scribbling notes onto a leather-bound legal pad on his lap, “was that in person or on the phone?”
“In person.” I told him about that final meeting.
“Since then, no communication?”
“He mailed a check.”
Graham lifted his head. “I assume you cashed it?”
I shook my head.
“Did you keep that at least?”
Another shake.
He frowned and scribbled a few more words onto the pad. “So you have no record of your relationship with Harrison? That’s what I’m understanding? No record at all?”
“No, I do not. As I said, I wasn’t expecting it would lead to a meeting like this. I just wanted to end it.”
“So how did it lead to this meeting?” he asked, looking at Ken for the first time. “I’ve spoken to Kenny here, but how is it that the two of you found each other?”
Ken took it from there. I watched Graham, and when Ken explained that he’d been called by Dominic Sanabria, the pencil stopped moving across the pad, and he lifted his head much slower.
“Dominic Sanabria called you three days ago?”
“That’s right. To ask if Lincoln was—”
“I’ve already heard the reason, Kenny. I’m wishing you might have found that information worthy of my attention. I believe I asked that you pass such things along.”
“That was several months ago,” Ken said.
“I don’t recall putting an expiration date on the request.” Graham stared at Ken for a few seconds, then sighed and looked back at his pad. He took his time with it, reading through all of the notes, and then he closed the notebook and set it on the edge of my desk.
“Was supposed to have the day off,” he said. “I decided, well, go in this morning, get a few things done, be gone by eleven. Noon at the latest. Now I’m in Ohio. That’s the way the damn days off always seem to go. You think you only got a few hours, then you’re in Ohio.”
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