Blood of My Brother (14 page)

“If the police don’t have your card, that means the killers do,” said Frank Dunn.

Jay did not answer. Frank watched as he consumed the bacon, eggs, home fries, and toast that he had made for both of them. They were sitting at Jay’s kitchen table. Outside, the snow had finally stopped and the world was silent. Bill Davis’s body, shot once in the forehead and once in the heart, at close range, had been found earlier that morning by his daughter, who had come to pick him up for church. During the tree lighting ceremony last night several people had seen two swarthy Latino men, in their mid-twenties, chasing a tall, good-looking white man with long, wavy brown hair, in his late-thirties-to-early-forties, through the lobby. This Frank had learned from Linda Marshall, who, tipped off by one of her many police contacts, had arrived at the Colonnade Towers while the crime scene team was still in Davis’s apartment.

“Do you think Garland’s holding the card, playing games?” Jay asked, pushing his empty plate away.

Frank had found Jay in his living room, drinking coffee, reading the
Star-Ledger
, a blood-soaked towel clumsily
knotted around the top of his left arm. The detective thoroughly cleaned Jay’s flesh wound, put a makeshift butterfly bandage on it, then made breakfast while Jay recounted the events of the evening before.

“No,” Frank replied. “I talked to the uniformed guys that responded. There was no business card under the door.”

“Well,” said Jay, “I’m going to Florida tomorrow, anyway.”

“That might not be a bad idea, actually.”

Linda had spotted a man crossing the lobby who matched Jay’s description of Chris Markey. When she tried to interview him she was abruptly blocked by his two assistants. A few minutes later Ralph Greco appeared to tell her that there would be no press interviews of any kind and that she had to leave the building so that his people could secure it and do their work. When Jay’s phone went unanswered, she’d called Frank.

“I’ll need Angelo Perna’s number.”

“Angelo Perna?”

“Yes, Angelo Perna.”

Frank, sipping his coffee, remained silent. That Jay had been in a free fall was obvious, but free falls were not always bad. They could clear the head in an amazing way, as long as you didn’t hit the ground.

“I’m going to talk to the clerk at the hotel, too,” said Jay.

“And what else?”

“Visit the office at Royal Palm Plantation in West Palm. That’s the property that Donna Kelly was supposed to be running for Bryce. It’s the only Powers property in Florida, in any event.”

“Just drop everything?”

“I could use a vacation.”

“So you’re looking at this like it’s a two-week cruise
where the passengers get to solve a murder as a fun activity?”

“Of course not.”

“It could take time,” Frank said. “What about your practice?”

“I’m worthless at the office. I’ve been giving Donnie more and more work. He can pretty much run it while I’m gone.”

Frank lit a cigarette and looked out of the bay window in Jay’s kitchen to the white-clad woods behind the house. Donnie, he knew, was Don Jacobs, an aggressive young lawyer who had been sharing office space with Jay for the past year, and who Jay gave work to from time to time.

“I spoke to Barbara this week,” said Jay when Frank did not answer. “I went to her house, actually.”

Frank smoked and looked at his young friend.

“She won’t let me see the boys,” Jay continued, “and won’t take the cash Danny left them.”

“The eleven grand?”

“Right.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I bought annuities in the boys’ names.”

“How old are they now?”

“Twelve and fourteen.”

“The husband’s a little twerp.”

“Right.”

“I’ll come with you,” Frank said. “When are you leaving?”

“To Florida?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow at two, on American.”

“You’ll have to stay with me tonight, at Lorrie’s. She has a pullout couch.”

“Fine. What about your job?”

“I’ll call in sick, then I’ll send my resignation in from down there.”

Jay said nothing. He looked squarely at Frank, who, conscious that he had just made, on the spur of the moment, one of the biggest decisions of his life, and of the chaos in his soul that had brought him to it, returned his young friend’s stare. He’s a smart kid, he thought, keeping his mouth shut.

“What about Dick Mahoney?” Jay asked, breaking the stare and the silence. “Did you talk to him?”

“He came up empty.”

“So it’s not organized crime.”

“Probably not. He did tell me one thing. He reads the papers, I guess.”

“What?”

“The attorney general of Mexico is named Lazaro Santaria. He has a brother named Herman Santaria.”

Jay packed, and they headed to Lorrie Cohen’s apartment in nearby Clifton. Frank often saw Lorrie on Sundays, using work, or breakfasts with Jay and Danny—which he sometimes actually made—as excuses for getting out of the house. Not that he needed any. His wife, Margaret, had multiple sclerosis, and often couldn’t get out of bed. Her sister, Rose, who lived with them and took care of Margaret full time, was always happy to see him leave. She didn’t even listen to his excuses, he knew. He also knew, as a cop for almost forty years, that to hunt, and be hunted, were distractions almost otherworldly in their intensity. The thing was, was it Jay that needed the distraction, or was it him?

Early the next morning Jay borrowed Dunn’s car and drove to Glendale Cemetery in Bloomfield to visit Danny’s grave. Near the cemetery was a nursery that was selling Christmas trees, and there Jay stopped and bought a grave blanket—dark evergreen boughs laced with holly and tied together with a red velvet ribbon—which he carried with him as he walked along rows of headstones looking for Danny’s. When he found it he was out of breath. The air was bitter cold, the snow deep, and there were no landmarks on the barren hillside to guide him to the spot where his friend lay. Breathing deeply he stood motionless for a moment before reading the inscription on Dan’s headstone and then kneeling to place the wreath on the grave.

Jay’s parents’ airplane had taken a long ten minutes to fall thirty thousand feet. Dan, too, had suffered before he died. And Kate Powers? Bewildered by the turn her life had taken, miserably unhappy—a client whose trust he had betrayed by sleeping with her twenty-two-year-old daughter—had she known she was about to be beheaded? What was Jay’s suffering, his loneliness, compared to all of that?

No doubt Al Garland and Chris Markey had their reasons for lying to him and to the public about their noninvolvement
in the Powers and the Del Colliano murder cases, and no doubt they would be angered by what he was about to do, and would try to stop him; and no doubt the two young men who had killed Bill Davis and almost certainly Danny and Kate Powers would now want to find and kill Jay. No doubt: a nice, simple, uncomplicated state of mind.

Looking down at Dan’s inscription again:
Daniel Michael Del Colliano, Born 1962-Died 2004, Son, Father, Friend
, Jay said, “I waited too long, Dan. I’m sorry. If I was the one killed like that, you’d have started the next day. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I’m starting now.”

Chris Markey’s career in the FBI was not typical. Born in South Boston in 1948 to working class parents, he realized in high school that the barricaded Southie culture was not for him. The day after graduation, he enlisted in the Air Force, and by 1969, while his contemporaries were getting high and protesting the war, he was flying covert operations for the CIA in Cambodia and Laos. In the mid-seventies a program was instituted to recruit military intelligence and CIA people with international experience into the FBI. Markey made the switch and embarked on a career of special projects involving Latin American countries. In the eighties, the Agency’s focus in those countries, especially Columbia, Panama, and Mexico, shifted from political corruption and sabotage, to the explosively growing drug trade.

After twenty years in the trenches, Markey was under no illusions that the war on drugs would be won. The American people did not have the will. He would leave it to the sociologists to figure out why. His job was to enter the fray on orders from above. When faced with a choice between the follow-the-rules mind-set of the FBI and the no-rules philosophy of the CIA—except deniability—he chose the CIA’s way.

The bad guys did not grapple with moral dilemmas. To them the end always justified the means. Unfortunately for Markey, the core principal of the Irish Catholic ethic in which he had been raised was that the end
never
justified the means, and when his young daughter died he saw it as divine retribution for a long list of mortal sins.

His current battle was the biggest of his career, with orders coming from the very top. He had had to apply the maximum pressure—a call from the United States Attorney General to New Jersey’s attorney general—to get the local prosecutor, Al Garland, to subjugate himself and his staff to the authority of Markey’s task force in the Powers murder investigation. And he had had to instigate a major court battle—guaranteed to generate a ton of unwanted publicity—with the
Star-Ledger
, over the reporter, Linda Marshall’s notes and sources, pitting the first amendment against necessarily unspecified “national security” interests. And these were only procedural skirmishes.

In the real arena, the one that civilians knew nothing about, where life and death were on the line all the time, Markey knew, despite his newly awakened conscience, that he would continue to use whatever means were necessary to achieve his objective. He knew who killed Dan Del Colliano and Bill Davis, and probably Kate Powers as well. The people they worked for had ordered murder, maiming, and torture as a matter of course over many years. If he ever got the Feria brothers into custody, he would not hesitate to do the same to secure their cooperation.

Given this state of affairs, he would certainly brook
no
interference from Jay Cassio. If the wiseass young lawyer’s anger over his friend’s murder led to the demise of his practice and of his own health, that was his business; but if it spurred him to inject himself into Markey’s investigation, as
Markey feared he had already done, then Cassio would be in for a great deal of trouble.

These were Markey’s thoughts as he entered Room 412 in the Peter W. Rodino Federal Building in Newark at two p.m. on the Monday after Bill Davis’s murder. Already in the room, seated around an oak conference table, were Markey’s two top assistants, Ted Stevens and Jack Voynik, and Phil Gatti, a DEA agent who had spent five years undercover, working the streets and back roads of Mexico’s drug scene from Tijuana to Mexico City to Guadalajara. Markey walked to the head of the table and placed the clipboard he was carrying in front of him. He looked around, nodding to the members of his team, before speaking.

“Forensics?” he asked, addressing his question to Stevens.

“No prints, except Davis’s,” Stevens replied. “The bullets taken from the body match the one in the hallway. Time of death, around five p.m. Nothing under the nails, no sign of a struggle, no toxins.”

“The airports?”

“Nothing,” Voynik said.

“I can’t believe they had the balls to come back,” said Gatti.

“Let’s talk about the witnesses,” said Markey.

“Out of the people in the lobby—a hundred or so—three definitely ID the Ferias,” said Stevens.

“I didn’t see their names in any of the papers, did you?” said Markey.

“No,” Stevens replied. “We don’t think they’re known.”

“Have they been spoken to?”

“Yes. They won’t be talking to any reporters.”

“Who’s the cop that spoke to the reporter Marshall?”

“A kid named George Rodriguez. He came forward this morning. He’s been suspended.”

“What about Cassio?”

“He was identified by four people.”

“He’s being brought in as we speak,” said Markey. “I hope.”

“He wasn’t at his house or his office,” Voynick replied. “His secretary says she hasn’t heard from him and doesn’t know where he is.”

“The Feria boys may have stayed around to do him,” said Gatti. “My guess is he surprised them upstairs, they took a pop at him and missed, and he escaped in the crowd.”

“So let’s find him,” said Markey, “and bring him in. We’ll talk to him and let him go, and then follow him for a few days. We may get lucky.”

“How would the Ferias know who Cassio is?” Gatti asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Markey answered. “But maybe we’ll publish his picture in the paper: ‘Possible Witness to Newark Murder.’ That should give them a leg up. This kid wants to help find his friend’s killers? Here’s his chance.”

Markey made one last check mark on his clipboard. He did not have to look up to know that his three subordinates were staring at him. What he was proposing was against all the rules, and probably a crime itself. Gatti, the new man, would have to get over his discomfort, which Markey could feel across the room, or quit the team. Recruited six months earlier, he had had sufficient acumen to obtain photographs of two young punks as they were getting into a limousine in front of a high-class apartment building in Mexico City, knowing that one of Markey’s targets kept an apartment there; and he had the street contacts to be able to identify them as Jose and Edgardo Feria, killers for hire who collected heads as trophies.

Markey looked into Gatti’s eyes for a second and then
said, “But if he does draw the Ferias out, remember, I don’t want them killed. Make sure everyone involved knows that. We can sacrifice Cassio, but not the Ferias. This Donna Kelly woman is either dead or in deep hiding. Without her, the Ferias are our only shot at the guys running the show.”