by Marie Force
“Oh, that guy. I...ah...” He gulped as he swallowed, making his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “What the hell happened to him?”
“That’s what we’d like to know.”
McTavish blanched and took a step back. “You can’t honestly think I had anything to do with that. Check the GPS report on my ankle monitor. I haven’t left this house in weeks except to buy food, which I’m allowed to do.”
“May we come in for a minute?” Sam asked.
He hesitated before he seemed to realize he didn’t have much choice in the matter. His shoulders sagged with resignation as he stepped back to allow them into the spacious foyer, then slammed the door.
“When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Gibson?” Sam asked.
“February sometime probably. Most of my old friends and quite a few family members quit calling after I was arrested.”
“Tell us about your association with Peter.”
“We played cards together a few times. I never even knew his last name, which is why it didn’t ring any bells for me.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“So he wasn’t one of the top lieutenants in your gambling organization?”
He met her glare with a stone face. “What gambling organization?”
“The one uncovered by the MPD Vice squad that led to your arrest?”
“Nothing has been proven in a court of law, and I remain innocent until proven guilty.”
Sam realized they were banging their heads against a brick wall here. She handed McTavish her card. “If you hear of anything that might help our investigation, I’d appreciate a phone call.”
He took the card but didn’t say anything else.
“We’ll show ourselves out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
SAM FOLLOWED FREDDIE out of the house. “That was a big fat waste of time.”
“You could tell he was scared, though. That’s worth reporting back to Robach.”
“Yeah, go ahead and send him an email.”
“What’s next?”
“Let’s go see Irma.” They’d been told she was staying at a friend’s house in the Del Ray section of Alexandria. Sam took the exit for Memorial Bridge, which took them into Northern Virginia.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Freddie asked. “I could go by myself so you don’t have to see her again.”
“She doesn’t scare me.”
“Still, she was awfully unpleasant yesterday.”
Sam shrugged. “She was looking for someone to blame, and I was convenient. No biggie.”
Irma’s friend lived in a stand-alone house on East Howell Avenue.
“If I were going to live outside the city, this is where I’d want to be,” Sam said.
“It’s a great neighborhood,” Freddie agreed. “Elin and I come here sometimes to eat and walk around.”
They went up the stairs to a quaint front porch that had wicker furniture and pots of colorful flowers. “Nice place,” Sam said as she rang the bell.
An older woman came to the door. She took one look at Sam and her friendly smile morphed into a frown. “What do you want?” she asked.
Sam and Freddie flashed their badges.
“We’d like to speak to Irma, please,” Sam said. “We understand she’s staying with you.”
“She doesn’t have anything to say to you.”
“We have some questions for her, and since this is a homicide investigation, we can ask her here or take her into custody and do it downtown,” Sam said. “Her choice.”
“You’d really do that to her after everything else you’ve already done?”
“I’m trying to help figure out who killed her son. I’d like to think we share a common interest in seeing justice done here.”
“Like you care if he gets justice.”
“I care about justice for every murder victim in my city.”
“Let her in, Marilyn,” Irma said.
Marilyn stepped aside to admit them.
Irma stood in the middle of the living room, arms crossed and her expression filled with hostility. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you about your recent conversations with Peter. We’d like to know about any friends he might’ve mentioned to you, if he was dating anyone or anything at all you can tell us about his recent activities.”
“You want to know if he was dating anyone,” she said with a huff of laughter. “Isn’t that rich?”
“Irma, I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was dating every one of the First Ladies of Football,” Sam said of the Redskins cheerleading squad. “I’m trying to figure out who tortured your son to death. I assume you want that information as much as I do.”
“Don’t act like you care about him. We all know you don’t.”
“I care about finding his killer. That’s what I’m focused on. Now, are you willing to help, or shall we have this conversation at MPD Headquarters?”
Irma sat on the sofa, the only indication she gave that the conversation would occur here rather than downtown.
Sam and Freddie took seats across from her, while Marilyn hovered in the background.
“What do you want to know?” Irma asked, seeming resigned to dealing with them.
“Who were his friends? Who did he talk about?”
“He liked the people he worked with at the store,” she said tentatively. “Especially Lucy. I got the feeling there might be something happening with her.”
Interesting, Sam thought, that Lucy never mentioned anything personal between her and Peter. “Anyone else?”
“He was friendly with his neighbor Raul, who lived on the second floor in his building. They went to some Feds games together this summer. Raul has season tickets. Occasionally he’d take Peter to a game, which was the only way he could afford to go. He fell on hard times after he was falsely accused of trying to kill you.”
“He wasn’t falsely accused, Mrs. Gibson,” Freddie said, keeping his tone calm even though Sam knew he was anything but calm when it came to this subject. “His fingerprints were found all over the bombs that were strapped to cars belonging to Sam and Nick Cappuano. His apartment was full of bomb-making paraphernalia. The only reason he wasn’t in prison is because we didn’t wait for a warrant to search his apartment out of our fear for the safety of the people living nearby. I regret that we didn’t wait, for many reasons, but now I regret it because if he’d been in prison, Peter would probably still be alive, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Irma glared at him. “Of course you’re on her side. She’s your boss.”
“I’m on the side of the truth,” Freddie said, maintaining his cool. “Regardless of whether you wish to believe it or not, your son tried to kill her and Nick. The only reason he didn’t succeed is because he wasn’t very good at making bombs. For that, we’re all thankful.”
Sam could see that Irma had more she wanted to say but wisely refrained from pursuing the “poor Peter” refrain.
“He was still friends with some of the people from his old job,” Irma said. “They didn’t desert him when everyone else did.” This was said with a pointed look at Sam.
Sam handed over her notebook. “Write down their names and anything else you know about where we might find them.”
Irma snatched the notebook from Sam’s hand and scribbled a few lines before handing it back to her.
Sam recognized the name of one woman they’d socialized with when they were married. “This helps. Thank you.” She started to get up to leave but then decided there was one more thing she needed to say to Irma, something that was long overdue. “I know you hate me, and you think you have good reason to, but I want to tell you a little story about my relationship wi
th Peter going back to when we were living together as roommates.”
Irma crossed her arms again, seeming defiant, but she didn’t stop her, so Sam continued.
“Peter and I used to hang out sometimes, order pizza, have a few beers, watch Feds games on TV. That kind of thing. One night, I went to a party with my sister, and I met a guy I really liked. In fact, I fell in love with him that night. That’s how great it was between us. He promised to call me when he got back from an overseas business trip in three weeks. I waited to hear from him, but he never called, or so I thought. The disappointment was crushing, and Peter made sure to provide a shoulder for me to cry on. I ran into that guy I fell in love with six years later and found out he did call. He called quite a few times before he gave up, thinking I didn’t want to hear from him after all. You know who took those calls and never gave me the messages? Peter. You know who was calling me? Nick Cappuano.
“If you wonder why your son and I could’ve never worked out long term it’s because our entire marriage was built on a huge lie. I take my share of the blame for why things didn’t work out between us. I was in love with someone else the entire time I was married to him. I own that. I thought you should know the role he played in deceiving me from the very beginning. We were better off without each other, and his actions after our divorce were proof to me that I’d done the right thing leaving him.”
“I didn’t know he’d done that,” Irma said, seeming slightly mollified by Sam’s story.
“That was the least of the mind games he played with me, Irma. I’m so sorry if it hurts you to hear this. That’s not my intention. I just thought you deserved the truth.”
“That’s not how he was raised.”
“I understand that. I’ve always known that. For whatever reason, he’d decided he couldn’t be happy with anyone but me, but I could never make him happy when my heart belonged to someone else, someone he knowingly kept from me.”
Irma released a deep sigh. “I only ever heard his side of it.”
“I know.”
“Are you really the best person to be investigating his case after everything he supposedly did to you?”
“I’m not thinking about any of that as I work this case. The only thing on my mind is finding out who did this to him and why. I swear to you that he will have my very best effort, the same effort I would give anyone else.”
Irma seemed to think about that for a moment before she nodded. “Okay.”
“I’ll be in touch as soon as we know more.” Sam handed her a business card. “Call me day or night if you think of anything else that might help, or if I can do anything for you. You should be hearing from Dr. McNamara today that they’re releasing his body so you can make funeral arrangements.”
“Thank you.”
Sam nodded and headed for the door with Freddie in tow. Once outside, she took a couple of deep breaths to clear her head and figure out her next move. Looking to Freddie, she said, “You were spot-on in there. Thank you.”
“As were you. She needed to hear the other side of the story.”
“I don’t like to speak poorly of the dead, but I agree. She needed to know what really happened.”
“Where to?” he asked.
Consulting her notebook, Sam said, “I want to see the neighbor, Raul.”
“Do we have a last name for him?”
Freddie consulted his notes. “Flores.”
“Why didn’t he pop in the canvass?”
“Wasn’t home.”
“Hopefully, he’s there today. Do a run on him, will you?”
“Yep.”
“And get the other names Irma gave us to Gonzo for follow-up.”
“On it.”
While he used the tablet in her car to contact Gonzo and run Raul through the system, Sam pointed the BMW in the direction of her own Capitol Hill neighborhood, wishing she were heading home for the day rather than to Peter’s building on Sixth Street.
“Raul isn’t in the system,” Freddie said.
They double-parked outside Peter’s building, and as they went up the stairs to the main door, Sam forced herself not to look down at the basement apartment where Peter had been tortured to death. On the directory she found a button for Raul Flores in 2B. She pushed the button and then waited.
A beep preceded his brusque, “Yeah?”
“Mr. Flores, Lieutenant Holland and Detective Cruz about the Gibson investigation.” They held up their badges to the video camera that presumably fed the images to the residents.
A buzz sounded, allowing them through the door. They took the stairs to the second floor, where Flores waited for them in the doorway of 2B.
“Come in,” he said.
Unaccustomed to such easy cooperation, Sam glanced at Freddie.
He placed a hand on the butt of his service weapon, letting her know he found it odd too.
The apartment was sparsely furnished but neat and clean. Flores stood with his hands on his hips as he waited for them to get to the point of their visit.
“You were friends with Peter Gibson?” Sam asked.
“Yep.”
So he was going to make her drag it out of him. Okay, she could play that game too. “Can you describe your relationship with Peter?”
“I didn’t have a ‘relationship’ with him. We hung out. Drank beers. Went to games. Played cards. We did what guys do.”
“When was the last time you saw or talked to him?”
“Wednesday. We caught a Feds game and had a couple of beers afterward.”
“Did he mention any problems he was having?”
“We didn’t talk about our feelings like chicks do, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Actually, I’m wondering if he said something like ‘X person at work is giving me a hard time,’ or ‘This guy confronted me on the street, and it was so weird,’ or—”
“Nah, he didn’t mention anything like that. He seemed normal. Chill.”
“Had he made any new friends lately?”
Raul appeared to think about that for a second. “There was this one guy—I think his name was Dante—who was hanging around. I only met him once, but a couple of times I hit up Peter in the last couple of weeks to do something, he said he had plans with Dante.”
“You get a last name?”
“Nope.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him?”
“Probably.”
Knowing Archie already had the security video from the area, she said, “I’m going to need you to come downtown and look at some film.”
“Awww, come on! Is that really necessary?”
“I’m afraid so. You can come willingly or we can take you into custody. Your choice.”
“Some choice that is,” he muttered. “Fine. Whatever. But you’re going to have to tell my boss why I didn’t make it to work.”
“I’ll give you a note.”
He seemed only slightly mollified by that as he grabbed his wallet, keys and cell phone to accompany them to HQ.
Sam glanced at Freddie, who nodded. He made the call to Archie to set up a viewing of a week of surveillance video in the area of Peter’s apartment. The apartment building didn’t have security video, so they were relying upon department-monitored video of the area.
They emerged from the building to a street overtaken by reporters who reacted the second Sam stepped foot out the door.
What the ever-loving fuck is going on now?
Their shouted questions formed a cacophonous mishmash of words that made no sense whatsoever to her, until the words vice president and mother rose above the din to register with her. She stopped at the foot of the stairs where they surrounded her.
Sam tossed her keys to Freddie with the unspoken order t
o get Raul out of there.
Though he took the keys, Freddie seemed hesitant to leave her in the midst of the hungry crowd.
“Go,” she ordered.
He went, but not without another look over his shoulder.
“What do you want?” she asked the gaggle.
They all spoke at once.
She sighed and looked up at the sky, waiting them out.
“Have you heard the news from Capital News Network about the interview with the vice president’s mother?” one of them asked.
“I know there’s an interview,” Sam replied. “What about it?”
When several of them exchanged nervous glances, Sam’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“The network is plugging several bombshell revelations about the vice president’s paternity, as well as an early marriage that was kept quiet.”
Sam felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
“Do you have any comment?” a network reporter asked. If they were here, this was probably being broadcast live.
That thought snapped her out of her stupor. Even though she was thoroughly rattled by what they’d implied, she refused to let them see that. “The vice president and I don’t comment on salacious rumors. Nicoletta Bernadino has never been in his life or close to him, so I would take anything she says with a grain of salt. That’s all I’ve got.”
“Are you making an arrest in the Gibson case?”
“Nope.” She pushed through the crowd. “His neighbor is assisting in the investigation.” After battling her way to the car, Sam got in the passenger seat. “Hit it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FREDDIE EASED THE CAR into the street without crashing into any of the reporters that gave chase.
“Damn,” Raul said when they finally pulled free of the crowd. “You deal with that shit every day?”
“Not like that, thankfully.” Sam was still reeling from what she’d been told by the reporters. “You think you can handle the video look-see by yourself?”
“Of course. Why?”
“I need to stop at my other office.”
“Oh, um, okay.”