by Eric Rill
“Look, I think I’m in trouble. I didn’t know where else to go,” Angela began, sinking into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Angela, I don’t think you are the kind of person who could have killed Castellano, but everyone else, especially that cop, seem to think so. And the way he tells it, you were in deep with those mob guys.”
“I didn’t kill anyone. In fact, Castellano tried to kill me a few minutes before someone took him out.”
Grant’s eyes widened. “Why would he do that?” he asked.
“Long story,” Angela replied, watching Grant slide a sharp knife through the sandwich before putting it on a plate.
“We don’t exactly have anywhere to go,” Grant said, pointing to the snow coming down outside the window.
Angela picked up a half of the sandwich, tossed it back down on the plate, and pushed her chair away from the table. “Okay, Nick, I’m going to trust you.” She thought to herself, What other choice do I have? Rosa was railroading her and Howell was freaked about the debit card. He hadn’t actually accused her of skimming, but his attitude had certainly changed since Rosa quizzed her about it in front of him. And then there was that guy in the lobby who obviously wasn’t there to ask her out on a date. “Things aren’t what they appear,” she said.
“No. They never are,” Grant agreed.
“I’m a police officer working with the state attorney general’s office on a money-laundering case.”
Grant turned back from the window. “You’re a what?” he said.
“Everything’s changed now. The whole thing has blown up, and I’m caught in the middle,” she said. “I feel like I’m getting it from all sides.”
Grant pulled a chair up opposite her and plunked himself down, wiping his hands over his face. “Let me get this straight: You’re a cop, not some hard-luck woman counting money for the mob.”
“I’m an undercover detective. I’ve been working the Pascale family for the last few months. Castellano was their man here in Columbus.”
“Jesus Christ!” Grant said. He looked up at the ceiling before turning his gaze back to Angela. “And why should I believe you?”
“Look, I can’t prove it right now. But I have no reason to lie to you.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Grant asked.
“I need your help.…”
“Look, I…”
“Before you say no, please listen!”
Grant folded his arms across his chest. “You’ve already lied to me once—about not counting the money up in 306.”
“What did you expect me to do? Tell you I was a cop?”
“You just did.”
Angela paused and sucked in a deep breath. “I have no choice now. I’ve been indicted and charged with murder. My bosses don’t want me to tell the cops that I’m undercover. And now even they’re wondering whose side I’m on,” she said in a discouraged voice.
“What’s your real name?”
“Angela will do for now,” she replied quickly.
Grant watched the tears beginning to form in her eyes. “I’ve never been involved in anything like this—anyway, I’ve got my own stuff going on.”
Angela bit her lip and looked away. “I’ll finish my sandwich and head out.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Grant said. “I just don’t know what you want.”
The tears were now streaming down Angela’s face. “What I want is a place to crash until I can sort things out—and I need to find out who killed Castellano. Whoever murdered him is probably after me.”
“What are you going to tell your bosses at the attorney general’s office?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
24
There had been no movement at the Langham to speak of since Castellano’s death. A few guys came and went, but there were no more deliveries. Leo Rigby was pissed and ordered Maggie Parks to start closing down the operation in spite of the evidence Lawrence Grant got them from his meeting with Craven and Castellano. Rigby was going to set up a new task force to bring down Columbus International and Maggie wasn’t going to be anywhere near it.
Maggie figured Pascale still needed to launder his “black money.” She was going to have to do something—and soon. If not, she had wasted a year, and more important, had tarnished what was left of her reputation.
Gary Roskind decided to take some holiday time owed him. So Maggie started a new case alone on the first shift over in Hilliard and continued working the now-defunct Operation Deep Sleep on her own time. Rigby wouldn’t be happy if he found out, but he wouldn’t be surprised, either. She lied to Rigby, telling him that they couldn’t break the lease on their surveillance apartment at the Langham until summer.
She spent most late afternoons and evenings sitting on the couch, one eye on the window across the courtyard, the other on the television. As much as she hated to admit it, she missed that jerk Roskind. At least his antics had kept her entertained—more than she could say for the cheap reality shows.
*
Maggie decided to see if she could find out anything more from Nick Grant. It didn’t take much to finagle his address from one of her sources. She parked her car across from 790 Rich street and waited. She got an unexpected bonus when she saw Angela Ferraro tramp through the dense snow up the walk to Grant’s house. The mob would be almost impossible to corner at this point, but the girl was just a paid bean counter, and not a smart one at that. She was the one who was going to take the fall. Maggie knew she needed to get to her. She wouldn’t be privy to Pascale’s overall plans, but if Maggie could get her to talk, she might just give up something. Maggie looked up at the flashlight shining in her face.
“What are you doing here, ma’am?” a young pimple-faced cop asked through a crack in the window.
“Jesus, I must have dozed off,” Maggie said in a sleepy voice, glancing down at her watch. “Shit, it’s already ten o’clock!”
“This is a no parking and no stopping zone,” he said, pointing to the sign a few yards away. “Let me see your license and registration.”
Maggie looked across the street just as Nick Grant’s front door opened. He and Angela Ferraro were huddled together against the frigid air as they gingerly made their way down the snow-covered walk to the street and headed east toward the corner convenience store. “That’s not necessary, Officer,” she said. “I’ll just move on.”
“I need to see—”
“That’s all you need to see,” Maggie said, flipping open her badge.
“Jesus Christ! FBI? What’s going on?” he asked, the beam from his flashlight bouncing off the metallic badge.
“Look, junior, can I go?” Maggie said, more as a statement of fact than a question.
“Yeah, sure,” the rookie stammered, backing away as Maggie turned the key and jolted the car into gear.
She made a U-turn and slid across the road, losing control for a brief moment before yanking the steering wheel to the right and coming to a stop a hundred feet from the store. Maggie could see Grant and the girl by the grocery section. She’d figured there was something with those two when she saw him chase after her the day Castellano got it, but she never would have guessed the girl was shacking up with him. Or was Grant working for Pascale? Or was the girl smarter than Maggie thought and was just using the window washer?
Maggie figured they would be heading home, so she put her car into reverse and carefully backed up to her original spot. The rookie was gone. She cracked the window and fished in her bag for her pack of cigarettes. As she brought a match near her face, she could have sworn she saw a figure behind a clump of snow-covered bushes on the far side of Grant’s house. She looked around but couldn’t see any cars parked on the street. Her first instinct was to check it out, but she was already stretching it by being here. She wasn’t even supposed to still be on Operation Deep Sleep—in fact, there was no more Operation Deep Sleep. Checking out something suspicious was one thing, but not radioing her location and not req
uesting backup was another—and not a good “other.” But she was already so far into the cow dung, a little farther wasn’t going to get her any dirtier.
She patted her holster underneath her coat, a habit she’d developed since once forgetting to pick it up off the dresser one morning after a drunken romp. She swung open her door, checking to make sure that Grant and the Ferraro girl hadn’t left the store yet. She took a long drag, flicked her cigarette into the snow bank, and started across the street. She stopped short of the house, digging some snow from inside the top of her black leather boots.
There were fresh shoe prints in the foot-deep drift. Maggie lit a match, trying to see if they would yield any clues, but the match flickered in the biting wind and went out. She tossed the matchbook into the snow bank in disgust, quickly retrieved it, wiped it off, and put it back in her pocket.
She released her gun from its holster as her eyes followed the trail of footprints along the side of the house. Once past the sidewalk, she slowly took a step forward, her foot sinking down, as if she were walking into quicksand. In spite of the dropping temperature, the snow hadn’t hardened yet because of the wind that was whipping it around, so she wouldn’t be making any crunching sounds that might alert the intruder.
Maggie tried to figure who she was chasing—a common thief, a drug addict looking for a quick score, or someone involved in the Castellano murder? Something in her gut told her it was the latter, which made her tighten her grip on her .40-caliber Glock. As she reached the end of the house, she heard voices from the street—Grant and the girl were coming back from the store. Maggie tried to shut out the noise so she could concentrate on whoever was behind the house. She held her breath and pushed her back against the building. You couldn’t squeeze a nail file between her and the clapboard frame. She closed her eyes for a brief second, opened them, raised her gun, and turned the corner.
A man in a ski parka with a hood hugging his head was standing on the stoop, jiggling the doorknob. She needed to get just a little closer to nail him, but there was a row of bushes between them, and if she jumped the hedge, assuming she could, he would either be off or would “off” her in midair. She opted for scare tactics. “FBI! On the ground! Move! Move! Move!” she screamed as she advanced, stepping carefully over the bushes, her gun targeted on the small of his back. Given his position, that was the best she could do. She could have tried for the head, but a miss might not even hit him; at least this way she’d get some piece of him. They’d taught her early on at Quantico that if you plan to shoot, you shoot to kill. A gun wasn’t for show.
“Columbus police!” the man shouted. “Columbus police!”
Nick Grant opened the back door. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”
“Back in the house and lock the door,” Maggie ordered.
“But, it’s only—”
“Back in the goddamn house!” Maggie screamed. “In the fucking house!”
“You,” she said, moving closer, “on your belly, legs spread. Now!”
The man resignedly dropped to his knees and then flattened out, molding his body into the dusty snow. Maggie grabbed a set of cuffs from her belt and lassoed him like a wild calf at a rodeo. Then she flipped him over. Her eyes bulged in amazement. The man on the ground was her ex-husband, Virgil Parks.
25
Virgil Parks made his way through the bullpen to the file room. Hank Morton was bent over in front of a metal cabinet marked Cold Cases, where homicides eventually ended up if they were not solved. “You wanted to see me, Captain?” Parks asked.
Morton held on to the cabinet as he hoisted his large frame to a standing position. His weight had run up in the four years since he had been promoted to top dog—the stress, greasy burgers, and lack of exercise evidenced by thirty pounds that had settled in around his middle. When he had played guard for Ohio State forty years back, he could bounce barbells off his muscular frame. Now he could barely straighten up from a crouched position. “My back is killing me,” Morton said, running a calloused palm over his soft flanks. “Where are you on the Castellano case?”
“I thought Bones was keeping you informed,” Parks said.
“He says it’s the Ferraro broad. What do you think?”
“Don’t know, Captain. Seems too easy—but Bones has a nose for that stuff.”
“You got that right. He doesn’t have one case in here, and never has since he joined Homicide,” Morton said, patting the cabinet. “And the DA seems convinced she’s toast, so looks like his string is intact.”
“I’m still working it on the days when the Dorsey case is slow,” Parks said, referring to a new case that Morton had assigned them.
“Dorsey is a gimmie.” Morton cringed, massaging his lower back in a circular motion. “I mean, when we got there, the woman was sitting in her bedroom with a gun on her lap, staring at the bodies of her husband and his girlfriend. How in God’s name Judge Massy gave her bond is beyond me—well, not completely beyond me, given that Bob Massy wears his dick on his sleeve and Barbara Dorsey is grain-fed USDA choice.”
“She’s not going anywhere, Captain. I’ve been following her for two weeks now. All she does is go to the gym and her shrink.”
“I’d love to get my hands on a recording of those sessions—or get a picture from the locker room,” Morton laughed.
“I’m heading out,” Parks said, lifting a set of keys from a rack by the door. “Can you sign me out on this?” Parks asked.
“What’s the license number?” Morton asked, reaching into his shirt pocket for his pen.
Parks turned the tag number over in his hand. “TWX 2365.”
He made his way down to the garage three floors belowground and shoved the key into the ignition of a navy Lumina. All the unmarked cars were the same—except for the mileage. There was an unwritten rule that seniority meant a car with fewer miles on it. He could have grabbed the keys to TWX 2451, but Morton might have groused, and the hassle wasn’t worth it, especially since some of the older guys were getting stuck with the “antiques” lately and chewing Morton’s ear off about it. So he ended up with his assigned car, the oldest vehicle on the force—three years and 94,000 miles, plus a heater that was on the fritz. But it was March and the weather had suddenly turned warmer after a storm had dumped twenty-plus inches on Columbus the week before; and, frankly, he was more concerned about the seat, which was still stuck, in spite of two written reports to maintenance. He would have had it fixed himself, but the cost was more than his discretionary expenses allowed, and he was damned if it was going to come out of his pocket.
Their union, the Fraternal Order of Police, had pushed through a pay scale based on seniority until you reached the rank of sergeant and above, so he was making the same as someone who was walking the beat downtown, or patrolling up in Worthington. When he had been working the Bottoms, he had liked the concept—but now, as a homicide detective, he thought it sucked to pay a patrol officer the same salary as he was making. It was going to be a long day, and his bum knee was going to be jammed up against the dash longer than he cared to think about.
Parks pulled out onto Marconi and took the bridge to the Bottoms. Rosa had been cutting him some slack lately, at least on Dorsey. But he had made it very clear that he didn’t want him “fuckin’ up” the Castellano case, and if he was going to do any work on it, he was to inform Rosa ahead of time. Parks thought that was total bullshit. He wasn’t going to argue, nor was he going to call Bones every time he went on a run.
He stopped across from Nick Grant’s house. Grant was outside talking to Bobby Gales. Parks got out of the car and crossed the street. “How’s it going, Nick?” he asked.
“Where did you get that shit box?” Gales smiled.
“That’s what you get when you’re a rookie, son,” Parks laughed. “Better than that cruiser I was stuck with on second shift two years ago. I could barely get that sucker out of first gear.”
Grant looked over at Parks’s car. His eyes wan
dered down to the license plate. His mind flashed back to the day he had seen Angela limping across the courtyard. The day Castellano was murdered. Looking beyond her, and beyond the south tower, he had caught a quick glimpse of a dark sedan. All he could remember about the vehicle was the last two digits on the plate—65. And that’s what he had told Rosa. He never heard any more about it. Never knew if the cops had run a check through their computers, or even if that was possible, given they had only the last two digits. Nor did he know whether they had bothered to go through any other machinations to find the dark sedan.
His eyes came to rest on a large red decal on the right back fender. It was one of those things that said “I lost 30 pounds. Ask me how.” Someone must have stuck it on, and none of the cops had bothered to scrape it off. Grant’s mind replayed a few clips from the scene by the south tower in slow motion, and with every frame his heart muscles tightened, until he felt like a boa constrictor was squeezing his chest. He hadn’t been able to read the decal that day at the Langham. The dark sedan had been too far away. But there had definitely been something that size on the rear fender—and it definitely had been red.
“You okay, Nick?” Parks asked. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Grant said, trying to shake the image from his mind. He never figured Parks for anything but a nice guy, even when he had found him outside the back of his house during the storm. Parks had told him he was just there checking to see if the door was locked and if he was okay. Parks’s ex-wife, the FBI agent, had given him such a tongue-lashing about being on Grant’s property unannounced that Grant figured he might have to call 911 with a domestic violence report. But Parks had dished back the same line in a booming voice, reminding her that she wasn’t even involved in the investigation.
Grant never would have dreamed that Virgil Parks was a killer.