“I always wondered why that Detective Bartoneri couldn’t find Lanna’s boyfriend. I guess, in fact, she did.” Her mom drew Tenley closer. “Now they’ve reopened the investigation, honey. It’s still possible her death really was an accident. But maybe now we’ll get some real answers.”
Tenley looked out the window, past the greening forsythia and the last of the tulips. Last year, they had put tulips from their garden on Lanna’s grave. And earlier this morning on her father’s.
Now it was just the two of them. She felt the weight of her mother’s arm around her waist, a weight that was good and strong and connecting.
“Why did Dad have to die?” Tenley couldn’t believe she was asking that out loud, but Dr. Maddux had told her to always say what was in her heart, and maybe now she knew there was no other way.
“Oh, Tenner.” Her mother turned, put one hand on each of Tenley’s shoulders. Tenley knew she was trying to smile, but her eyes were still red from the funeral, and Tenley knew her own eyes probably looked exactly the same way. “According to Detective Brogan, your father refused to give that-whoever he was-any money. When that person found out Greg was refusing to pay, and threatening to tell the police, he tried to stop him-and stabbed him. And ran.”
“What do we do now?” Tenley asked.
“We wait and see. It’s only been three days. Brileen’s with the lawyer. We’ll see what we can do for her, too.” Her mom reached out, cranked open the kitchen window. A waft of early-summer breeze came through the screen, and Tenley saw her mother’s chest rise with a deep breath. “When you and Detective Brogan saw her meeting Hewlitt, she was telling him Valerie had come out to her parents, and as a result he had no more hold on her. He bolted when the cops arrived at the U. But Ten? If you hadn’t forced me to talk to her, none of this would have been solved. We know what happened to your father, and maybe to Lanna-only because of you.”
Tenley tried to figure that out, tried to understand how each little decision anyone made pushed the world in a direction they could never predict, and how even when good people tried to do the right thing, it wasn’t always perfect, so how did you even know? But it was too big, and too hard, and her mom was right. They’d wait and see. Together.
“I love you, Mom,” Tenley said.
68
Jake stood in the hallway outside the interrogation room, hung up his cell phone, stashed it back in his pocket. Through the one-way window he saw Calvin Hewlitt sitting at the conference table, buzzing with anger and shepherded by the pinch-faced lawyer who’d arrived in a flurry of briefcase and demands. Jake had left them to stew with DeLuca. The Siskels needed to know what he’d discovered.
He still felt the weight of the phone call he’d just made to Catherine Siskel. There would be more to come, especially in the fight over the subpoena for the City Hall surveillance. But since Jake and the Siskels had nailed Dahlstrom and his co-conspirators Hewlitt and Bartoneri with their greenroom trap, it turned out the forbidden tape wasn’t needed to clinch that case.
As he’d told Catherine Siskel, they simply needed Brileen Finnerty. If she’d turn state’s evidence, she’d be their star witness. Now, with Finnerty as potential ammunition, Jake was about to fire his final shot. He entered interrogation room C. Endgame.
Hewlitt’s attorney stood, as if some “round two” bell had clanged. “Detectives, we’re ready to provide certain information,” she said, flapping over a page of her yellow pad, “in return for-”
“That’s not how it works, Ms. O’Shaughnessy.” Jake clanked open a battered folding chair but didn’t sit. “Information first, then we go to the DA. As you are well aware. Ready, Mr. Hewlitt?”
Jake had seen this look before, the deflating of arrogance, the collapsing of ego, the cold realization that whatever a suspect had believed about his own invulnerability, it was defeated by the sometimes successful system of justice.
Sometimes, like today, it worked.
“Hewlitt?” Jake said. “Again, this is all being recorded. First. You’re Hugh, correct?”
The lawyer gestured a weary hand toward her client.
“Whatever.”
“That a yes?” DeLuca sat the end of the table, one ankle on the other knee. He pointed toward a microphone mounted in the corner. “You have to say it out loud, Hewlitt. You know how tape works, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Hewlitt said to the corner.
And it was yes that Angie Bartoneri was in cahoots with Hewlitt and Dahlstrom. Hewlitt had explained she’d hired a street guy named Rodney Field to do the money-for-thumb-drive exchange.
“All he had to do was take the fricking bag,” Hewlitt complained. “It wasn’t my fault he went nuts when Siskel refused to pay. He’d put a fricking phone book in the bag to make it look heavy. Field told me he thought it meant he wouldn’t get paid. Fricking crankhead. I told you the truth! I told you he was the bad guy. Remember? You should charge Field with murder, not me.”
“Mr. Field is dead,” Jake reminded him. Angie was, too, professionally and personally.
DeLuca leaned toward Hewlitt, pointing. “After we stopped you from trying to kill Rodney Field, you knew Angie Bartoneri would make sure of it.”
And then Jake saw the whole thing, how even though relying on surveillance felt reliable, felt unassailable-in reality, it wasn’t.
“Think of it, Hewlitt,” Jake said. “If you’d succeeded? You’d have been the hero. Catching the Curley Park killer. And the surveillance tapes would have proved you right. Except they’d be wrong.”
“Screw you, Officer,” Hewlitt said.
Jake shot D a look. Don’t.
“Nice mouth,” DeLuca said instead. “Getting ready for lockup?”
“We’re done.” Hewlitt’s lawyer stood, flapped her legal pad closed. “I’ll wait for your call, Brogan.”
In fifteen minutes, Hewlitt was in custody, DeLuca at his desk with one last assignment, and Jake in his car. He pulled out of the HQ parking lot. Four hours until takeoff. But this damn case still bugged the hell out of him.
The whole crime was caught on camera, Catherine Siskel had admitted it, all on the illicit City Hall video. At least now they knew what it meant. But according to the supe, Mayor Holbrooke and the lawyer Kelli Riordan had already called, strong-arming them to withdraw the subpoena, demanding that the police superintendent, a mayoral appointee, keep the taping confidential. The supe had ordered Jake-“for now”-not to mention it. Jake wouldn’t be surprised if the supe had known about it all along. But the cover-up appeared to be under way.
That was way above Jake’s pay grade. He wasn’t sure how he felt about caving to City Hall, but he’d decided not to think about it. For the next four days, at least.
But he had one more thing on his preflight checklist. One last bit of police work before he turned off his brain.
Angie Bartoneri. What had happened to twist her from ambitious young cop to a jaded manipulative…? Well, greed, he guessed. Power. Ego. A destructive combination. And in a cop, especially dangerous. She’d even leaked information to the media. Unforgivable.
She’d admitted she’d tried to cover up Greg Siskel’s identity to give her crew time to get their stories straight. But was she complicit in murder? Though Jake’s crime scene guys were on it, there was no real evidence to link her to Bobby Land’s death. Jake needed a smoking gun to put her away forever.