Дэвид Балдаччи - Daylight

“But, Puller, how could that happen? A CID agent was the vic; that makes it your case, or at the very least gets you in the loop.”

“I made that argument last night and this morning and ran into a stone wall. Something about working with local cops to build trust and camaraderie.”

“That’s bullshit,” snapped Pine.

“It is bullshit. And my superiors up the line at CID think the same thing. But apparently orders on this came from up high, maybe past the uniforms and into the land of the suits.”

“What in the hell is going on here, Puller?”

“A cover-up of epic proportions. And for that to happen, there has to be a matching motivation. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put the possibilities here squarely in the double-digit range.”

“We need to find out what that is.”

“I hope I get the chance.”

Pine’s jaw eased down. “You mean—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I get pulled from the case.”

“What will you do if that happens?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. This has only happened to me once in my career. I never expected that it would happen again.”

“What did you do when it happened the first time?”

“Something I shouldn’t have,” he replied.

“And what will you do if it does happen again?” Puller didn’t answer.

Superman might have just gotten a dose of kryptonite,” said Pine quietly as she put her phone down. “He’s afraid he’s going to get pulled from the case.”

Blum absorbed this worrying information. “Anything else?”

“Yep, and it’s a stunner. Teddy Vincenzo’s dead. They say it’s a suicide or a drug overdose. Puller obviously doesn’t believe it. And neither do I.”

“I gathered that he was dead from the snatches of conversation I heard.”

“And the local cops have taken over the Jerome Blake case and they have the gun. John was left with McElroy’s body and that’s it.”

“Will he let that stand?”

“He got pushback from high up, perhaps beyond the military.” She glanced at Blum. “The suits outrank the uniforms in our system.”

“Well, it seems the cover-up has started, big-time.”

“I think it started a long time ago, actually.”

“What do we do now while Puller is trying to figure this out and we wait to get the photos for our witness to look at?”

“I’ve got a resource I can call on.”

“Who’s that?”

“The FBI has an RA in Trenton,” said Pine. “I know one of the agents, Rick Davies. Let’s see what he can find out for us.”

She brought Davies up on her list of phone contacts and made the call. Davies answered, and she told him the situation and what she wanted.

“You officially engaged in this?” Davies asked. “I thought you were in Arizona.”

“I was there when the shooting happened. I’m working with Army CID on the case.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll see what I can find out. Just to warn you, the Trenton cops positively do not like feds sniffing around their backyard.”

“Show me a local cop who does.”

She put down the phone and looked over at Blum.

“Now what?” asked Blum.

“Until we hear back from Puller or Davies or the school principal, we focus on another Vincenzo. Ito.”

Blum put her hands together and looked attentive.

Pine began, “Let’s look at this logically. Either Ito killed Mercy...” She paused, stiffening at her own words, and clenched her hands for an instant before relaxing and turning to Blum. “Or he abandoned her somewhere.”

“Or he gave her to someone,” added Blum.

Pine looked startled by Blum’s suggestion but quickly moved on. “Now, Mercy’s DNA is in a database at the FBI. Samples of all unidentified remains discovered anywhere in the U.S. are sent to that database for comparison checks. None have turned up that matched Mercy’s. I know that for a fact.”

“Was that your doing?” asked Blum.

“Yes.”

“What did you give them for Mercy’s DNA sample?”

“I’m her twin, Carol. I gave them a sample of my DNA. They put it in the database.”

“Of course, that was stupid of me. But that’s good news, then. No remains have matched her DNA.”

“Yes. But her remains might not have been found yet. And we can’t be sure that every agency across the country sends samples into the database. I’m sure some of them don’t, or a processing mistake was made. Or maybe she was taken out of the country and killed there.”

“Still, the odds are with you on that.”

“Now, if he had abandoned her, you would think someone would have found her, either dead or alive. She might have died from exposure or from animal attacks if she was left in some wooded terrain, which they have a lot of in rural Georgia. She could have starved to death or died from an accident.”

“But if so, you would think her remains would have been found by now.”

“Bodies out in the elements tend to disappear fast, Carol. Natural decomp, animal intrusion, if she fell into a river and got lodged on something at the bottom, lots of factors.”

Pine suddenly looked like she might be ill.

Blum said quickly, “But once more you have to look at the odds. And unless Ito had checked out a place beforehand to leave her, I doubt a guy from Trenton, New Jersey, and who had probably never been to Georgia, knew very much about places to abandon or get rid of her down there.”

“Well, according to what we found out while we were in Andersonville, he was in Georgia for a few months at the very least.”

“So are you leaning towards her having been abandoned?”

Pine rubbed her head and looked uncertainly at her friend. “That wouldn’t dovetail with the letter we read from Bruno. He was clearly pissed. He wanted revenge.”

Now Blum looked uncertain. “The only thing that cuts against that is everything we’ve learned about Ito thus far. It takes a lot to kill someone. It takes a lot more to kill a defenseless child.”

“He could have been driven to it by his love for his brother. By what happened to him.”

“May I play devil’s advocate?” said Blum.

“Please do.”

“How do we know that Ito loved Bruno? We’ve found no evidence of that.”

“Well, he went down to Georgia and took my sister and nearly killed me and then accused my father of the crimes.”

“Okay, let’s assume that is true. But the life he led before was polar opposite to his brother’s. And remember what Castor told us. He knew Bruno was a bad guy.”

“But he said he learned that from Evie, not Ito.”

“And you don’t think husband and wife were in agreement on that? I think they clearly were, from what we’ve learned.”

Pine thought about this for a moment. “Castor also told us that he never met Bruno.”

“That’s right. He worked for Ito all those years. Was with him every day all day, and Ito’s brother, who presumably lived in the area, or at least in New York City, never came by for a visit?”

Pine said, “And Evie’s neighbor didn’t like Bruno, either. And she said Evie hated him. Wouldn’t allow him in the house. And Ito didn’t object to that. The neighbor said Ito didn’t like Bruno.”

“Exactly my point.”

“Then why go down to Georgia at all and do what he did?” said a puzzled Pine.

“It might come down to what we read in the letter. It didn’t say much, but it did tell us that Bruno had maybe tried to do the decent thing for once in his life — not turn in a mole that was going after the Mafia families — and he ended up getting screwed. Maybe that just snapped something inside Ito. That sounds more plausible than trying to make Ito some cold-blooded killer on a rampage. Because that does not square with what everyone has told us about him.”