Vendetta (26 page)

“Makes sense.” He paused. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

She licked her lips. “We’re fine here.”

“Catherine, I can tell when you’re lying.”

J.T. cleared his throat. She’d been so concentrated on what Vincent had been saying that she’d actually forgotten J.T. was there. Not a smooth move for a cop. He was gesturing for the phone and she told Vincent to hold on.

As she handed the phone to J.T., she said, “Remember to speak in code.”

“Got it.” J.T. took the phone. “Vincent, get over here. Tess has been shot and she needs urgent medical care.”

“
J.T.
,” Cat said.

“Here.” J.T. handed the phone back to Cat.

“There’s been
shooting?
” Vincent said. “Were you not going to mention that to me?”

“I was going to get to it.” She flashed J.T. an exasperated look. He folded his arms over his chest and raised his chin defiantly. “There was shooting. Tess got grazed. Accent on flesh wound. She’s functional and alert. They got away.”

“How did they find you?”

“We think it was because Nico used his cell phone, but we aren’t sure.”

“Tess flattened it,” J.T. said to Cat. “The phone.”

“Where are you? I’ll come check on Tess.”

Cat gave Vincent the address, asked him to be careful getting there, and disconnected. J.T. headed back to his car. Cat jogged alongside him.

He scowled at her. “Were you even going to mention to my friend the doctor that my girlfriend was wounded in a firefight?”

“Of course I was.”

“
Next week
?”

Catherine let him vent as they returned to the cars. She put her coat over her weapon and she went inside the motel to the desk, requesting an upstairs room “away from the street”—in other words, out of sight—trying not to wince when the desk clerk informed her that she would have to pay for a full hour whether or not she “needed” that much time. She told him he wanted it for the entire night and he scowled.

“This isn’t a sting, is it? Are you a cop? Are you going to arrest all my customers just for having a good time?”

“What? No,” she said. He hesitated, and she pulled out three twenties, even though the room rate was significantly less. “I just need a place to land.”

He took the twenties as if they were dipped in acid, put a twenty in the register and slipped the other two into his pocket. Then he gave her a key and said, “I’m trusting you.”

You’re trusting my money
, she thought.

She and J.T. moved the cars around to the back of the building. She pulled her car right up to the stairway; Tess herded Nico and J.T. up to the first floor and hustled everyone inside.

She told Tess about the call and Tess’s reaction mirrored hers—relief that they might be out from under Robertson and Gonzales’s thumbs, anxiety that if they went that route, they had to go off the books again. As for getting cozy with DeMarco, that didn’t bother her much, either, so at least they were agreed on that. They had their principles, and DeMarco wasn’t going to be able to buy them.

Then she showed Tess the pen and Tess’s mouth dropped open. She took it from Cat and clicked it on and off, on and off, until Cat’s mouth dropped open too.

“Do you think this is one of Bailey Hart’s pens?” Cat said.

“When he fell backwards, and all his pens and stuff fell on the floor, I might have scooped this one into your purse,” Tess said. “So what’s
he
doing with a pen from an anniversary party for this David Whiteside at ConEd?”

“That name is really familiar,” Cat mused.

Tess’s eyes widened. ”Wait. I saw him on TV at J.T.’s. David Whiteside is high up in the Electric Operations divisions of ConEd. He was being interviewed about the blackout and he kept saying that his team would figure out what had gone wrong.”

Cat took up the thread. “Bailey Hart’s alarm system went to hell during the blackout and there was all this programming to make it go off later. Which might mean that he knew the blackout was coming because he was in contact with David Whiteside.”

Cat clicked the pen. “I’ll bet you anything that David Whiteside is gone. And that we’ll never see Bailey Hart again.”

“Alpha niner correcto,” Tess said, grinning, and they both went into the motel room.

A
fter Vincent tended to Tess’s wound, they left the fleabag motel. At his suggestion they took Tess and Nico to his houseboat; then he went to J.T.’s to meet up with him and Cat just as Tony DeMarco showed up. Vincent still wasn’t convinced they should be doing this and there was cold comfort in the fact that no one else was certain it was a good idea, including Tony DeMarco. They were all just one big happy circle of uneasiness. But Vincent had danced with the devil before, and he was sure he would again.

“This is nice,” Tony DeMarco said as his two bodyguards inspected J.T.’s home. He was bending over petting Mr. Boston White Sox, who was a pretty cute cat, Vincent had to admit. “What happened to the wall?”

Catherine also looked at the large, jagged hole that Vincent had made when he had lost his temper. Of course, she didn’t know that he had done it, and he couldn’t cop to it while the crime lord was there.

“I hit it with my baseball bat during the blackout. There used to be a wall sconce over there.” J.T. pointed to the other chunk that had been taken out near the front door—the one that he had actually done. It was good of J.T. to cover for Vincent, but he knew he should tell Catherine the truth at some point, and he would.

“If you ever want a job as a bodyguard, you just let me know,” DeMarco said. Vincent could tell by DeMarco’s heartbeat that he wasn’t kidding.

Robertson and Gonzales had been very unhappy that DeMarco had informed them he was going “out” for a while and refused to tell them where. He agreed to remain in contact via cell phone. Then he and his bodyguards drove all over the city to shake any tail they might have put on him. Without his knowledge, Cat had asked Vincent to trail after DeMarco as well to make sure that he wasn’t being followed by the Feebs.

“Tell me again how they were able to contact you directly,” Cat said.

He shook his head, not to refuse, but in apparent disbelief. “Email. Sent straight to me from Angelo’s laptop, which is in his room.”

“It could have been programmed to send at a specific time,” J.T. said. “If I had access to it…”

“Let’s focus on this,” DeMarco said.

“Okay,” J.T. said, “let’s see what we can do.”

DeMarco took a seat beside J.T. at computer command central. Cat was bent over his shoulder, and Vincent stood beside her. One of the bodyguards was holding Mr. Boston White Sox, who was purring.

The crime lord handed J.T. a flash drive and J.T. plugged it into his computer.

Against the orders he had received from the kidnappers, DeMarco had dared to place a camera in a tree in order to record the drop. As the recording began to play, they were looking at a jogging figure from the back—sweats beneath a heavy jacket, gloves, hat. The figure slowed and walked toward an empty park bench that seemed to float on a snowdrift. Then he turned his face toward the camera, and it was obvious to Vincent that it was DeMarco.

The bench was already clear of snow and he sat down as if to rest. With his shoe, he dug a hole in the snow. Then he stopped, took a deep breath, pulled a small brown paper bag from his pocket, and buried it.

“You can’t fit a million and a half dollars into a bag that small,” Cat said.

“It’s jewelry,” DeMarco bit off. “Worth a million and a half.”

Vincent watched Catherine think that over. She said, “You need to describe it. If they try to fence it, we could get a bust.”

“Family heirlooms,” DeMarco said. “A cameo from Sicily, which is the least valuable monetarily, but it means the world to me. Then they told me to put loose diamonds I had in a locket. Also very sentimental.” “The diamonds or the locket?” Catherine asked.

“It’s cloisonné, enamel, you know? Of the Madonna and Child. Very religious. My great-great grandmother’s. I gave them to Hallie, but only to wear. They’ll go to Angelo’s wife someday. If he…” Tears rolled down his cheeks. “If he gets married.”

The man’s sorrow was genuine. He was terrified for his son.

Then he added, “That’s why I think Robertson and Gonzales may be in on it. They saw Hallie wearing both those pieces. And a guy like me always has loose diamonds around, you know what I mean?” He wiped his eyes. “She’s not my most successful marriage. She’s kind of a lush, actually. A drinker.”

“She’s scared,” Catherine told him frankly. “She knows she’s in over her head and she doesn’t know what to do.”

There was a beat. Then he said, “Did she tell you that?” “Not in words,” Catherine replied. “You may want to have a talk with her.”

“Maybe I could buy her out.” Then he raised a hand. “Okay. Here it comes.”

They kept watching. For a moment the frame showed nothing. Then a shadow in the left-hand corner announced the approach of another individual. A man came into view. He was wearing a jacket with “Mets” across the back and a ball cap. As he sat on the bench, he kept his head down. Catherine groaned in frustration.

He was holding a box of popcorn. He tossed out a few kernels and a tree squirrel approached in that stop-motion way that forest animals moved. A second squirrel joined it, and then a third. The man kept tossing popcorn kernels. Then he “dropped” the box, and as the squirrels dive-bombed toward it, he leaned down and rapidly dug the brown sack out of the snow.

He began to rise. His head was still down.

“No,” Catherine said.

“Wait for it.” DeMarco leaned forward toward the screen.

Suddenly a little girl ran over to the cluster of squirrels. She clearly startled the man and he looked at her, displaying a three-quarter profile to the camera. He was very young with dark hair, and he had a piercing on his upper lip and eyebrow. He caught himself, raising his hand toward his ball cap and tugging on it, effectively concealing his face again. On the back of his hand was a tattoo of what could be an octopus.

J.T. selected the image and pasted it into the square so that the Homeland Security imaging system had a reference to search against.

“Wait.” Catherine looked hard at DeMarco. “Let’s go over this one more time. If we get a name and address, you’re going to let us go in. Us, not you.”

“One chance,” he said, “and then I take over.”

Vincent was amazed that Catherine was doing this. Surely she didn’t believe DeMarco? He wanted to tell her that the man was lying. His heart was thundering.

“Once chance is better than no chance,” she said. “Okay, J.T.”

He gave the software the “go” command and it imprinted its grid over the face, triangulating thousands of variables in its search for a match. The system took over while everyone watched. Vincent noted that Catherine’s heartbeat was steady, given the circumstances. He would have expected her to be far more excited.

She doesn’t believe we’re going to find a match
, he thought.

Sure enough, about a minute later, no match came up on the screen. J.T. exhaled and DeMarco let out a few choice curse words. He reached for the flash drive and J.T. ejected it.

“Thanks for nothing,” DeMarco said.

“We have leads,” Catherine said. “We’ll see if this takes us anywhere.” When he nodded as if he didn’t believe a word she was saying, she added, “Don’t do any more drops without telling us, and don’t let Robertson and Gonzales know you talked to me.”

“Got it,” he said. He put the jump drive in his pocket. He was about to go when Catherine gestured to him.

“Mr. DeMarco, can we speak privately for a moment?” He looked around the room, gaze landing on his bodyguards, who were both playing with Mr. Boston White Sox, and shrugged. Then he followed Catherine into the bathroom and she shut the door. Vincent sharpened his auditory system, and he could hear them perfectly:

“Claudia McEvers worked for Curt Windsor some time ago. We have found some connections between your son and that family. Do you have any idea why?”

DeMarco’s pulse quickened. “My son? What do you mean?”

“He had a picture of Curt’s daughter Tori Windsor hidden away. And he’s about to inherit a lot of money from Tori’s mother’s estate.”

DeMarco’s heart beast faster. “This is private family business. It doesn’t have anything to do with his kidnapping.”

“How can you be so sure?” Catherine asked. Her heart was beating faster too, and Vincent smiled faintly. She was enjoying tracking her prey, just as he would. Her quarry was answers and, ultimately, Angelo DeMarco.

“I just am.” There was silence, and then a long, heavy sigh. “I can’t tell you what you want to know. It would just open Angelo up to more danger. Don’t ask me about this again.”

The crime lord came out of the bathroom and headed out with his bodyguards, who handed off Mr. Boston White Sox to J.T. As Catherine walked back into the room, Vincent said, “I heard. So we’re stuck?”

Catherine smiled. “Only half stuck.” She turned to J.T. “Okay, let’s do it for real. Hopefully we’ll get a match.”

Vincent laughed. They hadn’t let him in on the scheme to fool DeMarco. J.T. saw his surprise and said, “Wait. It gets better. Did you see that thing on the back of mystery man’s hand?”

“The tattoo?” Catherine said.

“It’s not a tattoo. It’s a rubber stamp. They use it at Turntable on people who aren’t old enough to drink.”

“All right, J.T.,” Catherine crowed. “So this guy’s been to Turntable. And we have his picture. If the system comes up empty, we can show it around at the club.”

“Exactly. However, we’ll get a match if this guy is in the database,” J.T. reminded her.

They waited.

There was no match.

“This is for real,” J.T. said. “Not the faked result for DeMarco.”

“Not a problem,” Catherine said determinedly. “Can you print out some copies of his face? We’ll take them to Turntable and I’ll also see if I can develop our lead on whoever was in the alley when Claudia was killed. The popcorn-smell guy.” She turned to Vincent. “Can you watch Nico for us, so Tess can come to the club with me?”