Sworn to Silence (39 page)

He should have known there would be guilt. There always was. Because he was alive and Nancy and the girls were dead. Because life went on without them. Because
he’d
moved on. Sleeping with Kate would bring complications, too. He was in no frame of mind to be taking on a relationship with a woman. He wasn’t very good at making people happy. Eventually, expectations would come into play. He knew they were expectations he couldn’t or wouldn’t meet.

Sliding from the bed, he stepped into his jeans and left the bedroom. He grabbed his coat and keys, then headed for the Tahoe. He didn’t know why he was running away. Maybe because being close to someone took a hell of a lot more guts than being alone.

Around him the night was so quiet he could hear the patter of falling snow. He hadn’t smoked in almost six months, but at this moment he needed a cigarette with the intensity of an addict looking for a fix. Opening the passenger door, he plucked a pack of Marlboros from the glove compartment and lit up. He’d just taken that first heady puff when the front door squeaked open.

“You going to smoke that all by yourself?”

He turned to see Kate standing on the porch in a fuzzy robe and wool-lined mocks. She shouldn’t have looked sexy with her hair mussed and her body lost in the robe, but she did.

“I didn’t want to smell up the house,” he said.

“I could crack a window.”

She did and they sat at the kitchen table and passed the cigarette back and forth until it was gone.

“I feel like I’ve corrupted you,” John said.

“I hate to ruin whatever image you’ve drawn of me in your head, but that wasn’t my first smoke.”

He studied her, liking the way her hair fell into her eyes, and the way she swept it back with her hand. At that moment, he figured he liked just about everything about her. “So who
did
corrupt you?”

She grinned. “I have this friend by the name of Gina Colorosa. We went through the academy together.”

“Ah, those wild academy days.” Suddenly, he wanted to know everything about her. “How did Gina manage to corrupt a nice Amish girl?”

“If I tell you everything, you’ll have to arrest me.”

“I like Gina already.”

As if remembering, she smiled, then sobered. “I didn’t fit in here, especially after the bishop put me under the
bann
.” She shrugged. “I was young enough to convince myself it didn’t matter. I was angry and defiant. I saved enough money for a bus ride and moved to Columbus when I turned eighteen.”

“That had to have been a tough transition.”

She gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Talk about a fish out of water. All I had to my name was two hundred dollars. I wore the dresses my mother made. I cut the hem, but . . .” She shook her head. “You can imagine. Anyway, I was broke. No job. No place to live. Didn’t know a soul. I was basically living on the street when I met Gina.”

“How did you meet her?”

“It wasn’t love at first sight.” Her eyes flicked down, then went back to his. “It was cold. I needed a place to sleep. She didn’t lock her car.”

“You slept in her car?”

“She got in to go to work the next morning and there I was.” Her lips curved into a wry smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“So did she call the cops, or what?”

“Threatened to. But I must have looked pretty harmless because she took me into her apartment. Fed me. The next thing I know, I have a place to live.” Another smile, amused this time. “Gina did all the bad things I’d been warned about. Smoking. Drinking. Cussing. She seemed very worldly to me. I don’t know how or why, but we hit it off.”

“How did you get into law enforcement?”

“Gina was a dispatcher with the Columbus PD. I finally landed a job waiting tables at a pancake house. At night, she’d come home and tell me about her day. I thought she had the most exciting job in the world. I wanted a job like hers. So I went back to school, earned my GED. A month later, she got me a job as a dispatcher at a substation near downtown. That fall, we enrolled in a criminal justice program at the community college. A year later, we were in the academy.”

He stared at her, realizing he was getting caught up in this. Getting caught up in her. Not a good frame of mind for a man who would be leaving in a few hours.

“What about you, Tomasetti?”

“I came out of the womb corrupted.”

Laughing, she reached for the pack of cigarettes. John wasn’t sure why it pleased him when she lit up. Maybe because it made her more human, a little less perfect and a tad closer to his own tarnished soul.

“So what did you do before you were a cop?” she asked.

“I was always a cop.” He rolled his shoulders to ease some of the tension creeping up the back of his neck. “I think this is where you’re supposed to ask me about what happened in Cleveland.”

“I figured if you wanted to talk about it, you would.”

She didn’t look away. That impressed him. Probably more than he would ever be able to tell her. “How much do you know?” he asked.

“The media version. I know they usually don’t get it right.”

“It’s an ugly story, Kate.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

For the first time in his life, he did. Kate had given him something he hadn’t had for a long time: hope. Made him realize he might not need the alcohol and pills to get through the day. The time had come to lance the boil, let the demons out, start the healing process. “Do you know who Con Vespian is?”

“Every cop in the state knows about Vespian. Cleveland’s version of John Gotti.”

“With a little Charles Manson mixed in.”

“Narcotics. Prostitution. Gambling.”

“He had his fingers in a lot of pies, but he dealt mostly in heroin. Big time stuff, including murder when it was convenient. Worse when he wanted to make a point. Vespian and I go way back to when I was a street cop. I busted him twice. He got off both times. Every narc in the city had a hard-on for him. But he was one lucky son of a bitch. Dangerous, too, because he was half fucking crazy.”

“Bad combination.”

“He got off on beating the system. I wanted to be the one to bring him down. Somewhere along the line, it got personal.”

Her expression sobered, and John could tell she knew the story was about to take a dark twist. “My partner was an old-timer by the name of Vic Niswander. Great guy. Good cop. Funny as hell in a politically incorrect way. Just became a grandpa. Four months away from retirement. We used to kid around about it, but he wanted to get Vespian before he left.”

Remembering, John smiled. But as his mind took him through the nightmare that followed, the smile made him feel as if he’d just bitten into a rotten piece of meat. “Vic and I had a snitch inside Vespian’s operation. I don’t
remember where we found this guy. Just some dipshit junkie by the name of Manny Newkirk. Couldn’t think his way out of a bag. He’d spill his guts for twenty bucks. One night I set up a routine meeting with him, but I got sidelined. Kid stuff—frickin’ basketball or something—and I couldn’t make it. Niswander went in my place.” He blew out a breath to ease the pressure in his chest. “Someone ambushed them. Sons of bitches doused both of them with gasoline and burned them alive.”

John didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. Not with those ugly images running through his mind. “Everyone knew Vespian was responsible, but we couldn’t prove it.”

“But why burn a cop like that?” she asked.

“Vespian wanted information. And he got it.”

“What information?”

“My home address.”

Her recoil was minute, but John saw it. She knew what came next. “He went after your family.”

He nodded. “They broke into my house when I wasn’t there. Vespian and a couple of thugs. They raped my wife, raped my little girls, then murdered all of them. Burned them alive the same way they had Vic.”

Reaching across the table, she laid her hand over his. “I can’t imagine how horrific that must have been.”

“Some of the details never made the papers. The bodies were so burned, there was little evidence left. I didn’t find out about the rapes until I got my hands on Vespian.”

He couldn’t talk about what he’d seen when he broke through the line the fire department had set up. He wasn’t a strong enough man to voluntarily recall those horrific images. “The brass put me on sick leave. Somehow I got checked into a hospital. Fuckin’ psycho ward.” He tried to smile, but didn’t manage. “To tell you the truth, I barely remember.”

“I don’t understand why the cops didn’t go after Vespian.”

“Oh, they did. You know how cops are. They pulled together. Went after him. But the son of a bitch was
untouchable
.”

“I can’t imagine what that did to you,” she whispered.

“Well, while all that is going down, I’m in the hospital drooling all over
myself. One morning I’m in this
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
group therapy shit, and some crazy guy tells me all I need to get myself cured is a mission. I got to thinking about that, and realized he wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought.” He looked at Kate. “So I found a mission.”

“You went after Vespian.”

“A cop can make a pretty good criminal when he puts his mind to it.” John stared hard at her. “Do you want to hear the rest?”

She nodded. “If you want to tell me.”

“I started following Vespian, got to know his routine. Where he went. Who he spent time with. Every other facet of my life went by the wayside. I didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. But I was never hungry or tired. That crazy guy was right. I fixated on Vespian and it cured me.

“He played poker every Wednesday night. Like clockwork he drove to this mansion in Avon Lake. He usually left around three or four
A.M
. One morning when he walked out to his Lexus, I was waiting.”

Kate stared at him, her expression braced. She knew what he was going to tell her next. It was like watching a train mow down a stalled car.

“I hit him with the taser. When he went down, I cuffed him, threw him in the trunk and took him to a warehouse I’d rented. Bad neighborhood on the waterfront. I tied him to a chair, and by God I got a confession. Got all the gory fuckin’ details on tape. Torture. Rape. Not just my wife, but my kids. Little girls.”

“Oh, John—”

He cut her off. “I knew that tape would be deemed inadmissible.” He blew out a breath, wiped his wet palms on his slacks. “I didn’t plan to kill him, Kate. All I wanted was the confession. But when he told me what he did to them . . . it was like I stepped out of my body. I watched while someone else doused that sick motherfucker with gas and burned him alive.”

John could feel the tremors wracking his body. His breaths shuddered out like stifled sobs. The sound was inordinately loud in the silence of the house. When he held out his hands, they shook uncontrollably, so he set them on the table in front of him, looked Kate square in the eye and told her what he’d never told another human being. “I watched Vespian burn, and I didn’t feel a goddamn thing but satisfaction.”

She blinked rapidly, but it wasn’t enough to stanch the flow of tears. Her hand shook when she wiped them away.

“Now you know what kind of man you slept with tonight,” he said. “You know what I did. Why I did it.” He shrugged. “Poetic justice? Cop gone bad? Or just plain murder in the first degree?”

For the span of several heartbeats, the only sound came from his quickened breathing and the howl of the wind around the eaves. After a moment, Kate cleared her throat. “Did the cops know you did it?”

“They suspected me from the get-go. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots. It didn’t take long for the cops to start sniffing around.” He forced a smile. “But I was careful. I didn’t leave them anything to work with. All they had was circumstantial crap.”

“Enough to put you before a grand jury.”

“Yeah, but it took that jury less than an hour to hand down a no bill.” He smiled. “You see, the real evidence was against Vespian’s partner. I know because I planted it. That wasn’t in the papers.”

“Vespian’s partner was eventually tried and convicted.”

“He’s serving a life sentence in the federal pen in Terre Haute.” He smiled. “Now that
is
poetic justice.”

“What did you do after that?”

“Got my old job back. Deskwork because they thought I was a menace to society. I’d crossed a line, Kate. Big fuckin’ line. Once you do that, you can’t go back. The brass wanted me gone. They made life tough. Eventually, they got their wish.”

“How did you end up at BCI?”

“Technically, I had a clean record. I think the commander was so glad to wash his hands of me, he pulled some strings, got me hired. What the hell else are you going to do with a psycho, corrupt, highly decorated police detective?”

“Ship him off to a place where he can’t cause any problems.”

“Exactly.” He looked away, grimaced. “But we both know problems have a way of following you around. I’m pretty much washed up at BCI. That stigma thing. Too much baggage . . .” He lifts a shoulder, lets it drop. “Not to mention the booze and drugs.”

“John.” She said his name with sympathy. “How bad?”