“I don’t understand,” Edie said. “You’ve been involved in similar scenes your entire career. I would think you would be used to them by now.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m not being clear. A professional hit is…clinical. Detached. It’s personal to the subject being eliminated, obviously, but otherwise it’s just…business.”

  Edie shuddered. “Another day at the office.”

  “Yes,” Jack said, and then he winced. “You know, this stuff is all second nature to me, but it’s not easy talking about it with you.”

  “I know.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “But I appreciate you doing it. I need to learn about your work. I need to understand how someone I’ve always found to be gentle and caring can do what you do.”

  “It helps that the people I eliminate are the worst of the worst, evil to the core. I always try to keep that foremost in my mind. It’s the only way I could do my job.”

  “So,” Edie said, returning relentlessly to the subject at hand. “A professional hit is clinical. Just business.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But this scene was something else?”

  “It sure was,” Jack said. “It was frenzied, chaotic, the way only a knife attack can be.”

  “Messy.”

  “Extremely.”

  “Why would the killer do it that way?”

  “It tells me he didn’t just want to eliminate Spinelli. If he had, he could have used a gun and it would have been faster, easier and much less risky.”

  “So, what was he trying to accomplish?”

  “He was making a statement. He was angry. It was personal.”

  “So they knew each other.”

  “That’s the obvious inference,” Jack said. “Although it’s not necessarily the case. Maybe Spinelli hurt the killer’s family in some deeply personal way. He killed at least seven people in drunk driving incidents, so any of those family members would have plenty of motive. But those incidents all happened years ago, and in any case it’s impossible determine whether they knew each other without more background information.”

  Jack breathed deeply and then continued. “But the point is, my reading of the scene is that the killer snapped. He may have been in control when he broke into Spinelli’s home, and he may have regained control after the murder, but he snapped inside that house. He stabbed Spinelli in the back dozens of times after the man was already dead. I saw it. He looked like he’d been filleted.”

  Edie grimaced and swallowed heavily.

  Jack shook his head. “The guy lost it, and that makes him extremely dangerous.”

  “But you said his beef was with Rocco Spinelli. Now that he’s gotten whatever he needed out of killing Spinelli, maybe he’ll never be a problem again.”

  “Maybe,” Jack agreed. “It’s certainly a possibility. Or maybe now that he’s gotten a taste for blood he decided he likes it. Maybe the next time a driver cuts him off in traffic, or someone insults him, or something else happens that personally offends him he’ll snap and kill again. And this time the victim will be an innocent person, not a mob killer.”

  Edie’s eyes were large and round as she stared at Jack over the rim of her coffee cup. “Do you think that’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “But I can’t risk it happening. I couldn’t live with myself if he kills again and I could have prevented it but chose not to.”

  For a long time Edie sat silently watching the bustle of activity inside the Three Squares diner. Her pair of waitresses scurried back and forth, constantly on the move, keeping the half-full restaurant’s customers satisfied. She’d single-handedly rescued the diner from a state of near-collapse after her husband abandoned her, and no matter how many times Jack told her how proud he was of her, he still didn’t think she fully understood the depth of his feeling for her.

  “I can understand that,” she whispered. He looked into her eyes and saw they were wet with tears. “But what if the next person he kills is you?”

  She had never released her grip on his hand and now he squeezed it tightly. “You don’t have to worry about me. I know what I’m doing. I’ve dealt with much scarier and more dangerous people than this guy, trust me.”

  “I do,” she said. “I trust you fully. But all it takes is one mistake, or not even a mistake but rather just an unlucky break, and you’ll be gone forever.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” he said, shaking his head firmly.

  “I can’t lose you, Jack. I just can’t.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, babe. You’re stuck with me.”

  Now a single tear broke free and began leaking down her cheek. Jack had squeezed her hand tightly but she placed both of her small hands over his larger one and held on fiercely. “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  She wiped the lone tear away with a swipe of the back of her hand and then stood quickly, shoving her chair back with her legs. “Now stop distracting me and get out of here. Can’t you see I have work to do?”

  23

  Jack watched from his rented Ford Focus as Mary Carson backed out of her driveway and accelerated past him. He sank into his seat and leaned forward as if examining something on the dashboard in order to show as little of his face as possible if she happened to glance across the street on the way by.

  He needn’t have worried. She stared straight ahead as she drove, her attention focused on nothing but the road in front of her.

  After she passed, he tracked her progress in the rear view mirror until she turned a corner two blocks down and disappeared.

  He checked his watch. Two-fifteen. She’d told “Special Agent Bradbury” she worked the three-to-eleven shift at a manufacturing plant in Chelsea, so he felt comfortable she was on her way to work and would not return, barring sudden illness or emergency, until close to midnight.

  With nothing to do in Dorchester until early afternoon, Jack had decided to pay a little visit to the grieving widow staying at the Four Seasons in the morning. Mr. Stanton seemed satisfied Amber Spinelli had had nothing to do with her husband’s murder, but Mr. Stanton wasn’t the person she needed to convince.

  Jack was.

  She had come off grief-stricken and weepy, almost child-like. She claimed to know nothing about Rocco’s mob ties and had no idea who could possibly have wanted him dead.

  The interview was disjointed and awkward, with the young woman’s mother acting as moderator, and after thirty mostly fruitless minutes, “Special Agent Bradbury” had called it quits and left the hotel.

  The whole thing left a bad taste in Jack’s mouth, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. The young widow just seemed somehow…off.

  He shook his head, putting aside his concerns about Amber Spinelli for the time being and focusing on his current stakeout. He picked up a newspaper and laid it against the steering wheel, pretending to read as he kept an eye on the Carson home. Jack had chosen to park on the opposite side of the street from where he’d conducted his surveillance of the house previously, and with a different vehicle, so it seemed unlikely anyone would remember him.

  It was, however, always possible someone inside a neighboring home would become suspicious of the man sitting alone in his car at the curb if he stayed in one place too long, so Jack knew he would have potentially a very busy afternoon and evening ahead of him. He had rented a second vehicle in which to conduct surveillance, a three-year-old Ford F-150 pickup, and parked it in a strip mall lot less than a quarter mile away. His plan was to change locations every forty minutes or so, and change vehicles every other time he changed locations.

  The obvious drawback to all that moving around would be an inability to keep eyes on the Carson home at all times, but there was nothing he could do about that. It should at least enable him to remain undetected for the rest of the day. If the surveillance should drag on into a second or third day, his lack of assistance could become an issue, but that would be a problem to worry about later.

  For now, he would watch the house and be ready to move if he saw the activity he was looking for.

  The afternoon was warm and Jack rolled down all four windows inside the car, allowing for at least a little ventilation. The light breeze wrinkled the newspaper from time to time, an occurrence that might have been annoying had he actually been trying to read the paper, which he wasn’t. Nothing inside it pertained to his current mission, which meant he couldn’t have cared less about its contents.

  A little before three, he started the engine and drove off, keeping the Carson house in his rear view for as long as possible and then pulling a U-turn as soon as it disappeared out of sight. He drove back toward the cul-de-sac and pulled into an open space at the curb located far enough from his previous spot that he doubted he would arouse any suspicion on the busy Dorchester street.

  Ford had sold a lot of Focuses over the last decade, and a good percentage of them were dark blue. No one would notice it was the same car that had so recently been parked down the road. And if he were forced to change vehicles later this afternoon, he felt confident in the knowledge they had sold one hell of a lot of blue F-150s as well.

  He killed the engine but before he could spread the newspaper back across the steering wheel, he caught sight of his target. He dropped the paper onto the passenger seat, his focus entirely on the young man walking along the sidewalk in the opposite direction. The insolent-looking slouch he’d displayed last time Jack saw him was back.

  He was almost one hundred percent certain Mary Carson’s son—she’d said his name was David—was the same young man he’d seen on Rocco Spinelli’s in-home surveillance video slicing and dicing Spinelli to death in his bedroom.

  And now he was back.

  Jack risked lifting his mini-binoculars to his face for a few seconds. The man on the sidewalk was a long ways away and Jack wanted to be sure he had the right guy before he left the car.

  The image started out fuzzy and indistinct, but it only took a moment for Jack to focus.

  It was definitely David Carson.

  And Jack was up and moving.

  He climbed out of the car and closed the door, then began approaching along the sidewalk. The kid was paying no attention to Jack or to anyone else, and as Carson turned and began walking up the driveway toward his home, Jack picked up the pace. He wanted David Carson to get as close to the home as possible before he realized he was being followed.

  The kid was maybe twelve feet from the front stairs when he did just that. He stiffened, took two more halting steps, and then froze with one foot in front of the other on the ancient flagstone walkway.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Carson asked both questions without turning. He sounded simultaneously resigned and terrified.

  “Keep moving,” Jack said. “We’re either going to go inside the house and talk or you die where you stand. It’s your choice.” He kept a firm grip on the Sig in his right jacket pocket, but for now didn’t bother removing it. The kid didn’t appear to be armed, and even if he was, Jack knew he could pull out the gun and fire before Carson could access his own weapon and then turn and shoot.

  “What do you want?” the kid repeated, but at least he began moving again. He climbed the three steps to the door and removed a set of keys from his pocket as Jack watched closely and lagged behind, out of arms’ reach. Jack closed the gap between them while the kid inserted the key in the lock, not wanting to give Carson the opportunity to dart inside and lock the door.

  Carson entered the house and Jack followed. The kid began walking across the living room floor and when he got halfway to the kitchen, Jack said, “That’s far enough.”

  He stopped moving immediately.

  Jack eased the front door closed and locked it, and the kid flinched noticeably at the sharp snick of the dead bolt sliding into place.

  “You’re gonna kill me aren’t you?” Carson said.

  “That all depends,” Jack answered.

  “On what?”

  “On what you say to me over the next few minutes. I want some answers, and you’re going to give them to me.”

  “What if I don’t know the answers?”

  Jack ignored the question and said, “Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to ask you questions and you’re going to answer them, not the other way around. If you lie to me, or I sense you’re being evasive in any way, I’m going to start shooting and I’m not going to stop until you’re as dead as Rocco Spinelli. Understand?”

  He’d chosen the wording carefully, intentionally mentioning Spinelli’s name because he wanted to gauge Carson’s reaction to it. Anyone other then Spinelli’s killer would have been mystified by the reference and confused by the name.

  David Carson seemed to be neither mystified nor confused. He dropped his shoulders and squeezed his eyes closed as if waiting for the shooting to start.

  Jack waited, letting the fear wash over the kid.

  Finally he said, “Have a seat and let’s talk.” He still hadn’t removed the gun from his pocket because the kid seemed to be putting up no resistance. So far.

  David Carson dropped into the same easy chair his mother had occupied when Jack interviewed her as “Special Agent Bradbury.” He sat examining his fingernails and looking like he was about to puke on the floor.

  Jack remained standing but moved a little closer. He started by saying, “I know you killed Rocco Spinelli.”

  No answer. David Carson’s fingernails became even more fascinating.

  “Nothing to say for yourself?”

  Carson shook his head. “You’re crazy. I don’t even know who that is.”

  “I thought you might say that,” Jack answered. “But I have one very important question for you, and the answer will go a long way toward determining whether you live or die where you sit.”

  David Carson had squeezed his eyes closed again and it looked like he might break down in tears at any moment. “What’s the question?” he said.

  Jack lifted the Sig from his pocket and pointed it at Carson. Doing so wasn’t strictly necessary—the kid looked utterly defeated and nothing like the frenzied killer Jack had seen on Spinelli’s surveillance video—but he did it anyway because he wanted to emphasize the gravity of what would come next.

  “Why did you set me up?” he said.

  Carson had steadfastly refused to look at Jack from the moment he’d approached outside, but now he lifted his head and met Jack’s gaze steadily.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  24

  Jack shook his head. “There’s no point denying it, kid. There’s no point denying any of it.”

  Carson shrugged and returned his attention to the floor. “You can say whatever you want, but I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Is that so? Apparently you’re unaware that Spinelli had a home video surveillance system. Apparently you’re unaware that the video system was synced to a home security system, turning on the cameras the moment you broke the glass in the basement door. Apparently you’re unaware there is crystal-clear video of you attacking Spinelli with the knife and stabbing and slashing the unarmed man until you killed him, and then adding dozens of thrusts into the corpse for good measure.”

  Carson lifted his head as Jack spoke, and now they locked eyes. The blood had drained from the kid’s face and he looked terrified. Haunted.

  “Finally I seem to have gotten your attention,” Jack said with a smile. “And before you continue your strategy of ‘deny, deny, deny,’ let me make something clear. I’m not a cop, so you don’t have to worry that if you admit to killing Spinelli, you’ll hurt your defense against murder charges down the road.”

  “If you’re not a cop, how could you know about the video?”

  “You need to learn to pay attention, kid. I told you already how this was going to work. I ask questions and you answer them. I’m not a cop, and I’ve seen the video, and that’s all you need to know.”

  Carson hung his head and mumbled something under his breath.

  “Try again,” Jack said. “This time make it loud enough to hear.”

  The kid raised his voice, but only marginally. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Jack said. “I know you’ve been in trouble with the law, or your mother wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to protect you. What—”

  “My mother?” Carson interrupted. “When did you talk to my mother? I saw the cop who questioned her, and it wasn’t you.”

  “Of course it wasn’t me. I already told you, I’m not a cop. But that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally give people the impression I might be one.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Carson said.

  “He’s not here right now, and if he were, I don’t think he’d waste much time or energy protecting the likes of you. Now, as I started to say before you interrupted, what was your beef with Spinelli? Why the knife attack?”

  “And you’re not a cop,” Carson said.

  “I’m not a cop.”

  Carson sighed. “Fine. I’ve been trying to get an in with the Palermo family for months, and they wanted nothing to do with me. The last time I talked to Spinelli, he called me a dumbass. Said I was a street-level punk with nothing going for me, and that I was way too stupid to handle even the lowest-level Palermo assignments. He was a total dick. He told me to leave him alone and said that if he ever saw my face again, he’d chop me up and feed me to the sewer rats in Boston.”

  “So you killed him? In what universe did that seem like a good idea?”

  “I had a plan,” Carson said. “I figured if I could off Spinelli and then set up some dupe to take the fall, I would prove my value to the family. I could go back to them and lay the whole thing out and they would have to give me a job, then. They would see I was worthy of a spot in the organization.”

  “Kid, the mob doesn’t work that way. They’re not going to—”

  “Oh my God,” Carson said as everything finally fell into place in his head. His eyes widened and his face turned even whiter. Jack wouldn’t have thought it possible. “Now I understand what you meant when you asked about a setup. It’s you. You’re the guy I hired to kill Spinelli, the guy who was supposed to get arrested inside the house for the murder. I was watching from the woods and I saw you escape after the cops left.”

 

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