It would be months before Paolo heard the whole story:
That Laura had been alerted to listen to his backyard conversation after hearing him repeat Nelthorp’s name, and soon deduced that he wasn’t just reporting to his AISE supervisor, as Renate had first suspected.
That, with Dickie’s assistance, they had intercepted a later call and Laura had pieced together enough of the Sicilianu chatter to realize that Paolo was on Taffi Tafuro’s payroll.
That, shortly after they locked Corbin in the safe room, Dickie recorded a direct conversation in English between Paolo and Gus Mazzara. Paolo warned Mazzara that the team had Corbin in custody, that she’d revealed the location of the migrant camp where Riley had stashed the nanny and baby, and that they were planning to rescue them the next morning.
That, minutes later, Mazzara had called back to outline his plan to eliminate the entire team and make their bodies disappear, ending the call with a boast that he would lead the attack himself.
And that Renate’s shouted warning and the automatic weapons fire had been carefully staged for his benefit.
All of this Paolo Nori would learn at his extradition hearing after the Italian courts issued a warrant for his arrest for multiple offenses against that country’s Codice Penale and Codice Unico Anti-Mafia.
Not that the Italians would get their hands on him anytime soon. The American justice system took a dim view of conspiracy to commit murder.
45
Laura went to the young woman with the baby. She was cowering against the rear wall of the trailer, child in her arms and weak with fear.
“Lei parla Italiano?” she asked her.
The woman shook her head.
“English?”
“A little.” Her voice trembled.
The trailer swayed, and the woman’s eyes widened with fresh apprehension, as Jardine and a burly trooper entered. Jardine advanced straight to Laura.
“You gave us a scare,” he said.
“Sorry.” She shot him a warning look and turned her attention back to the woman. “My name is Laura. I’m a Customs officer. This is Scott. He’s with the police. We both understand your situation. Please tell us your name?”
“Lavinia … Lavinia Dalca.”
“Where are you from, Lavinia?”
“Romania.”
“I’ve seen you before. In Sicily. I watched you board a freighter with this baby. I know you must be very frightened, especially after what just happened. I want you to know that we’ll take care of you and you will be well treated. You have our word.”
Lavinia burst into tears.
Laura held out her arms and Lavinia gave up the child.
“Is there a bottle for her? Some milk?”
Lavinia pointed to a shelf. Scott retrieved a half-full baby bottle. Laura sat on a discolored couch, with the baby on her lap. She held out her hand, palm up.
“I need a sample.”
Scott squirted a sample liquid onto her hand.
She smelled it, and then tasted it. “It’s okay.”
She started to feed Gisella.
* * *
She hadn’t felt well.
A pinching sensation. Barely noticeable, but enough to intrude into her few moments of quietude.
She hadn’t noticed that she’d missed her period, but when she did, she put it out of her mind. She was only a week late. It had happened before.
But then it was two weeks.
She knew before the test.
She knew … because she felt different.
She knew because her favorite Primitivo smelled like vinegar.
But, when she finally knew, her reaction was exactly the opposite of what she’d always thought it would be.
She felt complete.
She felt … perfect.
The father was a boyfriend of a few months. Not even a boyfriend. A college liaison. A man-child wrapped in his own dreams. Predictably, he freaked. He freaked, and then he disappeared.
But his selfishness, his cowardice, didn’t bother her.
She felt complete, and that was all that mattered. She still had that little white spot in the ultrasound image. That little white spot that was her baby.
Her child … growing.
Growing for four and a half magnificent, soul-soothing months.
Growing until she wasn’t.
“There is no easy way to say this,” the doctor said, taking her hand. “Your daughter has no heartbeat. She has died.”
She refused to believe him.
It was pouring rain when she drove home from the doctor’s office. An oldies station was playing Annie Lennox, and Annie was singing about the rain.
Four days later, she drove back to the doctor’s office. It was still raining, and Annie Lennox was still singing about the rain.
Four days of rain. Four days of hell.…
Four days to finally run out of ways to deny the truth.
She hadn’t told her grandmother. Nonna had raised her to be tough, and she was.
But being pregnant, and then not pregnant, made her understand something her Nonna had never taught her. When it came to losing a child, Laura Pace was just like everyone else.
It had almost destroyed her.
* * *
Laura started to feed Gisella, and for a few fleeting seconds, she left the rain behind.
Gisella had taken the nipple, but she wasn’t drinking. She wasn’t sucking, and she wasn’t swallowing. She just lay there in Laura’s arms, staring up at her.
Staring, but not focused.
Silent.
Too silent.
Laura felt her forehead. “Scott, I think she needs a doctor!”
“I keep telling them!” Lavinia sobbed. Fresh tears flowed.
Scott turned to the trooper. “Blake, call an ambulance!”
“No.” Laura lurched to her feet. “Get us into a unit, light it up, and take us to the nearest clinic. There must be one in LaBelle. Lavinia, come with us!”
Later, while the doctor gently questioned Lavinia and examined Gisella, Jardine stepped outside to take a call on his cell. When he returned, he pulled Laura out into the reception area. He looked upset.
“What was that ammo talk? That gun was loaded with live rounds!”
“He was speaking Italian. I answered in English to get the message across to you. So you’d know he had a gun on me.”
“I got that, but you took a huge risk, taunting him like that! We could’ve arrested him anytime. We had the evidence from Dickie’s interceptions.”
“Illegal interceptions! Scott, we talked about this. We agreed to flush him out. Now we’ve got him on tape in a one-party-consent intercept. Why all the second-guessing?”
“Because … hell! Don’t you get it, woman?” He let out a rattling breath, dropped onto a chair, and grabbed a magazine.
Laura took the seat next to him. He ignored her. She glanced at the article he was pretending to read.
CHRISTMAS DECORATING IDEAS
She leaned close. “By the way, I knew it was live ammo. But Rolf removed the firing pin from Paolo’s gun two nights ago, when he was cooking dinner.”
“Renate told me.”
“You know? Then why all the fuss?”
He turned, his face inches from hers, his eyes wet with relief. “Because that was Rolf on the phone. He says Paolo brought a different gun.”
For the first time since he’d met Laura Pace, Scott Jardine saw uncertainty flash through those searchlight eyes.
She leaned against him.
He held her tight.
46
The rain came, soaking the battlefield.
It soaked the living. And it soaked the dead.
The operation had gone well. Their brigade had grown to over two hundred strong, and a quarter of the fighters were women. Anna Conte led an all-female squad, with Silvana as her next-in-command. Together with three squads of men, they had switched from the usual tactic of taking on the last few trucks in
a German column, striking hard, and then melting away. This time, they had engaged an entire twenty-vehicle column of transports, stopping it in its tracks and wiping it out.
They had carried the day because of Anna’s courage and imagination.
Wearing a brightly colored dress, and with her thick black hair falling across her shoulders, she had stumbled out into the roadway ahead of the convoy, startling the lead vehicle’s driver with the spectacle of a pretty, well-dressed woman in apparent distress. He hit the brakes, forcing the entire column behind him to halt. Instantly, both his truck and the rearmost vehicle were destroyed by antitank weapons, blocking the road in each direction and boxing in the column. Withering rifle and machine gunfire from the forest on both sides of the narrow mountain road had completed the job.
Yes, the action had been a success. Scores of German soldiers were dead, and the brigade had sustained only nine casualties—but one of them was Anna Conte.
Silvana Pace sat in the downpour, holding Anna’s head on her lap, watching her beloved friend’s life drain away into the mud.
She held her, and she listened, and she wept.
She wept for a beautiful, courageous woman … and for the death of hope.
Even if this war was won—and at last it looked as if it would be—for Silvana Pace, in that time, and in that place, all hope was lost in a wasteland of brutality.
“Giovanni!” Anna gasped.
Anna’s lover was among the dead. Silvana knew it, but she couldn’t find the words. It didn’t matter. Even through dying eyes, Anna Conte had read her face. She accepted the news with an unearthly sigh.
“Angelo,” she whispered. “He’s with the nuns.”
Their son had been born in the home of Giovanni’s sister. Giovanni had been with Anna for the birth but, hunted by the secret police and threatened by a tightening ring of betrayal, they’d been forced to leave the baby with the sister and return to the brigade.
A month ago, news had reached them that Giovanni’s sister had died in an air raid and Angelo had been left with a convent.
“Find him, Silvana! Tell him our stories. Give him your love.” Blood welled from her throat as she gasped her last words. “Give him hope.”
“I promise,” Silvana whispered.
To Silvana Pace, those words had seemed a hopeless promise, made out of loyalty and compassion to ease her beloved friend’s passing.
But not long after that blood-soaked day, the war had ended, and cautious, watchful hope had returned from the wasteland.
She had found Angelo. She had told him the stories. She had given him love. And she had given him hope.
When that hope died in a fireball over Scotland, she began again.
Telling her granddaughter the stories.
Giving her love.
And teaching her cautious, watchful hope.
47
The black Ford Expedition came off Route 41 in a squealing controlled slide that swiveled heads in the parking lot at the Everglades Chamber of Commerce Information Center. But the incensed driver wasn’t on a quest for tourist brochures. He was heading for the Collier County sheriff’s district 7 substation right next door.
A dozen people were gathered near the steps leading to the station’s front door.
Behind the crowd was a mobile TV van.
That tableau just further enraged the driver.
FBI Special Agent Alan Turnbull slammed on the brakes six feet from the crowd, causing a few of the nearest members to blurt obscenities. He bailed out, leaving his door open as he mounted the steps at double time, brushed past a wooden podium, and barreled for the station entrance. He didn’t notice the two shoulder-mounted cameras that had just documented his reckless driving and were now recording his frenzied rush for the door.
Don Henderson, one of the two agents who exited the vehicle behind Turnbull, had noticed. He reached in, shut off the engine, retrieved the keys, and carefully closed the driver’s door. Both he and his companion, Special Agent Ed Schenk, were pretty sure that Turnbull would come to regret that little performance, but each man kept that thought to himself. They followed their boss into the building at a deliberately unhurried pace, but with bemused looks on their faces that—unforeseen by them—would play again and again, nationwide, on news segments to come.
They entered the building in time to hear Turnbull shouting.
“You catch my fugitive and don’t even give me a heads up? And what’s with all the fucking reporters outside? Grandstanding on my case? I’ll have your badge, you asshole!”
A calm male voice replied. “No, you won’t. But I’ll have yours.”
The two agents exchanged glances and quickened their pace. They entered the substation’s mishmash of desks and cubicles in time to see their boss face to face with Detective Jardine. A burly deputy was striding toward them, hand on his cuffs. Henderson and Schenk rushed to intervene.
Breathing hard, Turnbull backed off. “Where’s the prisoner?”
A question, but delivered as a demand.
“Deputy Newman will show you to the cell. Take all the time you want. I’ll be in the lieutenant’s office.”
As Scott Jardine strode through the room toward Lieutenant Powell’s office, a dozen faces followed his progress. Every face wore a smile. At the doorway, he turned.
A dozen pairs of hands applauded.
* * *
It took four minutes.
Turnbull stormed into the lieutenant’s office without knocking. It was touch and go. To the observers in the room behind him, it looked as if Special Agent Schenk’s hand on Turnbull’s jacket was all that prevented him from assaulting Jardine.
In fact, it was the scene confronting Turnbull that had stayed the enraged agent’s hand. Lieutenant Powell was sitting at his desk. Scott Jardine was standing at his side. And Laura Pace was sitting comfortably in a visitor chair, bottle-feeding a baby.
Next to her chair was a neat pile of banker boxes.
“Sit down, Mr. Turnbull,” the lieutenant said quietly. He shot a look at Schenk and Henderson, standing in the doorway. “You two should hear this.”
When everyone was in place, the lieutenant said, “Go ahead, Scott.”
Jardine looked directly at Turnbull. “You’d like to know why your girlfriend is in custody.”
Turnbull didn’t say anything. He just gave an abrupt nod. It was obvious that trouble was coming, and that it was coming for him.
Jardine addressed Henderson and Schenk. “For your information, gentlemen, the prisoner in our holding cell is CBP’s Miami port director, Phyllis Corbin. A U.S. Marshals transport is on its way here now. Corbin will be moved to the federal detention center in Miami. She’ll sit there while the state attorneys for four different Florida counties and the United States attorney decide on the charges she’ll face. I’ve been told that those charges will include”—he read from his notebook—“murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, money laundering, conspiracy to commit visa fraud, and a very long list of immigration offenses. Also facing some or all of those charges are Gustavo Mazzara and Francis Riley. Mazzara is a known organized crime boss from New York. Both men are already lodged in cells at the detention center, along with several of Mazzara’s associates who are being held on various parole violations and firearms charges. We are also processing an Italian national named Paolo Nori.” He turned his gaze back to Turnbull. “The problem for you, Agent Turnbull, is that Phyllis Corbin is your longtime girlfriend, and during your team’s hunt for Customs agent Laura Pace, you have been feeding Corbin information about the operation. The additional problem for you is that Corbin and her Mafia accomplices—” He stopped as all three FBI agents stiffened in their seats. “Yes, gentlemen, I said Mafia. Your own field office in New York confirms that Mazzara is old-school Mafia. As I was saying … they framed Agent Pace for the murder of Kenneth and Darlene Eden. Corbin was passing all the information you gave her directly to her accomplices, and she was doing everything she could to g
et to Agent Pace before you did. Not to apprehend her. To kill her.”
He let that sink in, then continued. “Lieutenant Powell has been advised that the director of the Bureau’s Inspection Division is on her way here. She wants to hear the recordings we have. I assume that she will then decide whether to recommend your suspension from duty.”
The fight had gone out of Turnbull. He sat there, shrunken in his chair.
“Along with what I’ve just said, Agent Turnbull, there’s something else you will need to explain.”
“What?”
“I knew your office wouldn’t cooperate, so I asked the Palm Beach detective who was present during Phyllis Corbin’s witness interview to send me a copy of her statement. At one point Corbin said”—again, he read from his notebook—“‘I ordered Lockhart to brief ICE and then go home and stay there until her transfer became official.’”
“What about it?”
“Would you like to explain why you never sent anyone to find out if Agent Lockhart—whom you now know is Laura Pace, this lady sitting here—had ever briefed anyone at ICE about a baby-smuggling investigation, and if so, who?”
Turnbull was silent.
Although they were sitting near Turnbull, Jardine could see by their expressions and body language that Henderson and Schenk were already distancing themselves from their boss.
Schenk broke the silence. “You said something about recordings.”
Jardine pulled an electronic device out of his pocket.
48
Lieutenant Powell and Detective Jardine exited the station through the front doors. The scrum of reporters was still waiting, augmented by a growing number of curious locals and tourists who had drifted over from the information center next door.
A microphone had been set up on the podium. Lieutenant Powell spoke first:
“Some of what you will hear today will not be easy to listen to. Some of what you hear will not make you proud to be an American. I could stand up here and say pretty words about justice coming through in the end. It has, but as you are about to learn, for many lives justice has come too late. Now I’m going to turn this microphone over to Detective Scott Jardine, who will explain why we asked you to join us today.”
Killing Pace Page 25