Dead reckoning, p.9
Dead Reckoning, page 9
part #4 of Jack Sheridan Series
“We’re fine for now, thank you.”
The door closed and Jane Halberg pulled the cart to the center of the room. “I assume you drink coffee, Detective?”
Burke had had two coffees already this morning, but accepting the offer would perhaps help put the pair of women a little more at ease. Plus, he was more than a little curious what room-service coffee inside a thousand-dollar a night establishment might taste like and he couldn’t imagine ever getting another opportunity to find out.
“You assume correctly. Thank you, Ms. Halberg, that’s very kind.”
She turned to her daughter and said, “All right, baby, let’s get you out of bed. Come sit at the table and drink your coffee while we chat with Detective Burke.” She took Amber by the elbow and pulled her toward a circular table placed near the window, then busied herself making coffee.
Burke sat across from the new widow and said, “Let’s start with your trip to Ohio. How long had you been planning to visit your mother?”
“Pretty much since the last time I went home.”
“That would have been about a year ago?”
“Yes. Almost exactly a year ago.”
“Were friends and acquaintances aware of your plans?”
“I didn’t keep it a secret, if that’s what you mean.”
“So, anyone harboring a grudge against your husband would have been able to learn quite easily when he would be alone in the house.”
She shrugged. “I suppose.”
“And, to your knowledge, was anyone harboring a grudge against Rocco? Business contacts, friends, ex-employees, anyone you can think of?”
“Rocky didn’t discuss business with me. Not ever. He said it was for my protection. A lot of people, including cops, misunderstood him and he said he didn’t want them being able to use me to get at him.”
Jane Halberg placed steaming cups in front of Burke and Amber, and then sat at the table between them, cradling her own coffee. He ignored her and continued to question the widow.
***
When he left the hotel sixty minutes later, Burke decided the coffee had been satisfying.
Amber Spinelli’s answers, not so much.
But that wasn’t the same as saying he felt she was being deceitful. While there was still a long way to go before he would clear the dead man’s wife as a suspect, his gut feeling was that her grief was real, not manufactured, and that she was truly mystified as to who might have hated “Rocky” enough to slice and dice him in his own bedroom.
She steadfastly refused to acknowledge her husband’s mob connections, and insisted his legitimate construction company was his only business. That was patently absurd, of course. Rocco Spinelli had a rap sheet dating back to long before his current wife was born.
Even though she had to have known her husband was connected, Burke’s impression was that Amber Spinelli had managed to convince herself the world—and especially law enforcement—was out to get him. Whether she was truly that blind or just willfully ignorant was impossible to know based on one conversation.
When he was preparing to leave the hotel, he stood and said, “I don’t know if the Georgetown Police have informed you yet, but your home is no longer considered a crime scene. The tape has been removed, and you’re free to return whenever you wish.”
Amber Spinelli shuddered visibly. “I’m not going back there,” she said. “I don’t think I can ever go back there.”
Burke rode the elevator to the lobby by himself. Then he stepped into the sunshine and considered his next move. It was barely noon. Time to pay a visit to the dead man’s ex-wife.
17
Jack knew any interview with Rocco Spinelli’s wife would take Detective Burke some time, so for forty-five minutes or so he spent more time considering the bizarre scenario of being recruited to eliminate a man, then showing up to do the deed and finding someone had beaten him to the punch and, oh by the way, had tried to set him up to take the fall for the murder.
He’d been a professional assassin for a long time—his entire adult life, and he was now closer to forty than to thirty—and while he’d seen a lot of things people might find hard to believe, this was a new one. As frame jobs went, it was fairly creative, but Jack couldn’t get past the fact that using a knife had meant the killer almost certainly had left some of his own DNA at the scene.
That fact may or may not have mattered to a jury if Jack had been apprehended inside the dead man’s home, but it struck him as amateurish. It was definitely not the kind of mistake a professional would have made. And that encouraged him because it meant he was much more likely to root out the person who’d tried to set him up, but it also bothered him.
Who outside Rocco Spinelli’s gangland connections would have hated the man that much? Based on what Jack had discovered about Spinelli’s background and personality, it wasn’t difficult to imagine him leaving a trail of angry and bitter people in his wake, but killing someone in such an intimate, up-close-and-personal manner suggested something beyond anger and bitterness.
Something more like white-hot rage.
He was ruminating on that subject when Matt Burke rounded a corner and strode into view. The detective was moving briskly toward his car and his entire manner suggested not a man ready to take a lunch break, but rather someone interested in getting to his next appointment.
Good. Jack had no desire to tail the cop to Wendy’s and watch him eat a double cheeseburger.
Burke fired up his engine and backed out of his parking spot. Jack waited until the car disappeared around the concrete pillar of the parking garage before starting his own car and following. As much as he hated dealing with the city congestion, Jack knew the snarl of Boston traffic and its endless one-way streets would make it easy to follow Burke with only a minimal risk of detection.
If the cop’s destination was somewhere in the suburbs, things would change. But for now, Jack satisfied himself with paying the charge at the garage’s exit, allowing a couple of cars to fill the gap between himself and his target, and then following Burke’s lead.
***
It turned out he didn’t have to worry about tailing Burke into the suburbs. Fifteen minutes after leaving the Four Seasons behind, the homicide investigator pulled into a paved, pothole-pocked driveway in front of a small single-family home in a tiny cul-de-sac in Dorchester.
Jack eased to the curb at the cross street and watched as Burke climbed out of his car, glanced down at a notebook in his left hand, and then peered at the number nailed to the front of the house. Only one other home had been built along the little circle, and its yard was overgrown, the house ramshackle and clearly abandoned.
The detective seemed satisfied he was in the right place and slammed his car door closed. Then he lumbered across the front yard and up a set of rickety wooden steps.
It seemed obvious to Jack that the detective had continued his investigation by moving from an interview with the widow to one with the next most prominent non-mob-connected person of interest on his list: the ex-wife. The Organization’s dossier on Spinelli stated the dead mobster had been married once before and divorced more than twenty years ago.
Down the street the detective pressed a doorbell and waited.
A moment later the front door swung open and a middle-aged woman stood just inside the house. Detective Burke said something and the pair had a short exchange before the woman clapped a hand to her mouth in apparent surprise.
Burke just told her that her ex is dead, Jack thought. He tried to gauge her reaction to the news for sincerity and decided it seemed about right. She had to have known Rocco Spinelli was mobbed up if she’d been married to him for longer than five minutes, so she couldn’t have been shocked to learn he’d been killed. Still, being informed of a death is always surprising unless the deceased is suffering from a terminal illness or is extremely old, neither of which situation applied to Spinelli as far as Jack knew.
After a moment, the woman regained her composure, more or less. She nodded and opened the door and Burke disappeared inside.
Jack glanced around at the shabby neighborhood and decided if this was, in fact, Spinelli’s ex-wife, she sure hadn’t been able to afford a quality divorce attorney. “Rocky” had taken her for everything but her dignity.
Maybe he’d taken that, too.
While the detective remained inside the home, Jack scanned the area but also maintained awareness of the front door. He didn’t want Burke sneaking past him while he rubbernecked, particularly since he wasn’t looking for anything specifically relating to the murder of Rocco Spinelli. It was more a case of exercising a career-long habit: maintaining the maximum possible awareness of his surroundings.
Traffic was steady, but this was a working-class neighborhood and in a few hours he knew the streets would be choked with cars as men and women made their way home after another workday. He wondered idly whether Burke had called ahead to ensure the ex-Mrs. Rocco Spinelli would be home, or he’d taken his chances with a cold call.
The second option was more likely. Surprise the witness and the interrogator will have a better chance of getting the real story. Let the witness know you’re coming and she has the benefit of minutes or hours to hone an alibi or massage a story.
After less than half an hour, the front door swung open again and Burke appeared. He stood just inside the home, his back to the door as he continued a conversation with someone Jack could not see. He assumed Burke was still speaking with Spinelli’s ex. There was no reason to believe anyone else was home.
He assumed also that Burke hadn’t heard or seen anything to spark his interest in the woman as a suspect; otherwise his visit would likely not have concluded so quickly.
None of the neighborhood traffic had turned down the lonely cul-de-sac during the thirty-plus minutes Jack had been sitting here, but now a midnight blue Toyota began a right turn from the busy thoroughfare. It eased onto Melton Drive—the cul-de-sac’s road—and then swerved violently back toward the street from which it had just turned.
Interesting.
The car cut off a pickup and then swerved into an empty spot on the curb not twenty feet in front of Jack.
After a moment a male figure exited the passenger side of the car and then leaned in through the open window and began speaking to the driver. Ten seconds after that the passenger retreated to the sidewalk and waved as the Toyota screeched away from the curb. It pulled a U-turn and flashed past Jack, and he watched in the rear view mirror as it hung a left at the next intersection and was gone.
The passenger—it was a young man, probably early twenties, with curly brown hair and a tall, skeletal frame—stood unmoving on the sidewalk for a full ninety seconds, his eyes glued to the front door of Spinelli’s ex-wife’s house. He slouched forward maybe ten feet and stopped again.
Jack began to suspect it was the sight of Burke’s car in the driveway that was spooking the kid. He’d heard the expression, “Like a deer caught in the headlights” dozens of times, hundreds probably, but he doubted it had ever been more appropriate than in this situation. The young man looked exactly like a deer standing in the middle of a lonely country road at night, frozen to the pavement by the headlights of an onrushing car.
The screen door swung open and Burke exited the home. He walked down the rickety stairs and turned toward his car as Rocco Spinelli’s ex-wife stood just inside the door watching him go.
Jack thought Burke couldn’t look more like a cop if he tried, with his years-old suit and the gold detective shield clipped to his belt and the handgun strapped into a shoulder holster revealing itself with each flap of his unbuttoned suit coat.
The kid—Jack wondered what it said about him that he considered a full-grown adult male who was probably only fifteen years younger than him a “kid”—began backing slowly away from the house along the sidewalk, his eyes tracking Burke’s movements.
By now the cop had reached his car.
Burke opened his door and slid into the front seat, and only then did the kid from the Toyota turn his back and begin striding hurriedly away from the home of Rocco Spinelli’s ex-wife. He wasn’t running, not quite, but he was moving with a purpose he had definitely not exhibited previously.
Burke fired up his engine and began backing out of the driveway as the curly-haired young man reached the cross street. He turned right at the corner and disappeared.
Burke began motoring slowly away in the same direction. Where the kid had turned, Burke continued straight to a traffic light in the distance. Then he, too, turned right and was gone.
Jack’s intention had been to continue following the cop for the remainder of the day, and perhaps the next few as well, until getting some sense of where the investigation was headed. But that plan changed instantly with this development.
The young man was the right age to be the son of Spinelli’s ex.
He’d been heading straight toward the only occupied home at the end of the cul-de-sac before seeing the cop standing in the door.
Then he’d looked like the guiltiest man alive, before bolting. He had morphed from laconic to terrified in the blink of an eye.
Interesting.
Maybe the kid’s reaction had nothing to do with the murder of Rocco Spinelli. Maybe he was dealing drugs, or wanted for a parole violation, or any one of a million other possibilities.
Still, it was something. It was the first something Jack had managed to unearth, and it looked promising. It certainly merited a little of his time. He could always pick up Detective Burke again tomorrow morning and continue with his original plan if this possibility didn’t pan out.
But for now, he would continue watching this little house in Dorchester and see what might happen next.
***
Nothing happened next.
Nothing happened for over three hours.
Eventually, though, late in the afternoon, just as rush hour traffic began picking up in the neighborhood, the young man with the curly hair and the skeletal physique reappeared.
He approached on foot, along the sidewalk from the direction opposite where he’d vanished at the sight of Detective Burke. He moved cautiously, inching toward the house with what Jack thought could be considered the textbook definition of “extreme caution.” He hovered down the block, gazing at the house for at least three minutes as he obviously tried to determine whether the coast was clear.
Burke’s car as nowhere to be seen, so Jack thought the kid might be overplaying the caution angle a little. What did he think, Burke had ditched his vehicle and was even now cleverly concealing his bulky frame behind a shrub, ready to leap out and collar the kid as he climbed his front steps?
In any event, after a couple of minutes the curly-haired young man continued along the sidewalk, the shuffling, slouching gait he’d exhibited earlier back in full force. He turned up the driveway and crossed the weedy yard to the front entrance, fished a set of keys out of his pocket, then unlocked the front doors and disappeared into the home.
We just moved from interesting to fascinating, Jack thought.
18
Overall, Matt Burke considered today’s events to be a net plus.
He couldn’t complain about the results of a day where he uncovered video evidence showing the murder occurring in real time. That such a video existed was a rare and wonderful gift, something that almost never happened in the world of homicide investigation, even in a society where everyone carried sophisticated recording devices in their purses or back pockets.
So he couldn’t claim to be disappointed in the investigation’s progress.
But the rest of the day had turned out to be a bust, and not the kind where he placed a suspect under arrest and tossed his ass into a jail cell.
The grieving widow struck Burke as a naïve young woman who had stumbled into a marriage with a slimeball old enough to be her father by virtue of her good looks and less than genius IQ. But neither of those factors was illegal, and they certainly didn’t add up to a murder conviction.
He could by no means clear Amber Spinelli at this point, but his gut told him she had neither the brains nor the desire to hatch a murder plot against her husband.
The visit to Spinelli’s ex-wife hadn’t yielded any better results. His initial impression upon seeing the shabby little house sitting in the middle of the shabby little Dorchester neighborhood was that her living situation might represent motive. Who was Rocco Spinelli to sit in his grand house with his much younger and more beautiful wife when Mary Carson was struggling to make ends meet after divorcing his sorry ass?
And it was always possible that was the case, but Burke didn’t think so. The former Mary Spinelli had seemed genuinely shocked to learn of her ex-husband’s violent death, and Burke had dealt with enough suspects that he thought his radar on the subject was pretty reliable.
Plus, the divorce wasn’t fresh and painful; it had happened a long time ago. “We got married when we were both teenagers,” Carson had said to him, “and I figured out inside of a few months I’d made a huge mistake. Even then, Rocco was in deep with the mob, and I knew eventually he would end up dead or in prison. He was flashing money around and driving fancy cars, and that held a certain allure when we were dating, but once we got married it occurred to me I was always going to play second fiddle to his crime connections, and sooner or later I would end up alone.”
She’d said it all matter-of-factly, answering all his questions with no apparent guile. When he’d mentioned that some people stuck in her living situation might resent the fact that her ex was living such an affluent lifestyle while she was…not, she had laughed like he was doing a Vegas standup comedy show.
When he asked what she found so funny, she’d said, “How much time do you have? First of all, Rocco isn’t ‘living an affluent lifestyle’ anymore, is he? He isn’t living any lifestyle anymore, exactly as I predicted so long ago.”
