Rick Mofina - Vengeance Road

He made a call from a public pay phone and it was answered by the third ring.

“It’s Gannon, you read today’s paper?”

“Yup. Big story.”

“I need to see you.”

“All right, the usual spot, say, half an hour.”

He took the New York State Thruway south to Lackawanna, the former steel town, which was now harvesting the wind. When he got there, he entered the south section of Holy Cross Cemetery.

One of the area’s largest cemeteries, it held over one hundred thousand graves, including those of people who had built this part of the country, immigrants who’d helped dig the Erie Canal, or worked on Great Lakes steamers or in the steel mills.

A good place to bury secrets, he thought as he drove slowly along the graveyard’s eastern edge, to the Garden of Consolation. After parking, he sat on a bench near a stand of oak trees and waited.

Within ten minutes he saw a familiar Chev Impala stop some distance away. A woman got out and started toward him. A white woman about his age, dressed in a lavender T-shirt, dark blazer, jeans and navy leather flat shoes. Her auburn hair was pulled up in a neat bun.

This was Adell Clark, a former FBI agent.

Two years back, he’d covered a botched armored-car heist at a strip mall in Lewiston Heights. The FBI had been tipped to the robbery and moved to thwart it. Clark was on the scene and was shot twice. She returned fire, killing the two suspects, aged twenty and nineteen. They were brothers from Philadelphia.

In the days that followed, Clark agreed to be interviewed. He wrote a feature on the case and they’d kept in touch ever since.

Her recovery had been rough. A bullet was still lodged in her lower back, forcing her to walk a little slower than most people, or endure a lot of pain. “Pills make me loopy, so I never take them.” To this day, the full terms of her disability claim remained tied up in red tape.

Clark was a divorced mother of a little girl who needed expensive drugs to cope with a rare medical condition. They lived in a seventy-year-old two-bedroom house with a leaky roof on Parkview in Lackawanna where Clark ran a one-woman private-detective agency.

She used him as an investigative resource. And he used her. That’s how it was.

Clark lowered herself carefully onto the bench.

“So, Jack, talk to me. How’d it go?”

“I need you to reassure me that our information is solid, Adell.”

“This stays here with you, me and the dead,” she said.

“Of course.”

“After they found Bernice Hogan’s body, SP’s lead detectives called a multi-agency meeting with Buffalo homicide, Erie County, Amherst and several local and federal agencies, including the DEA, BATF, the border people and the FBI.”

“Why?”

“They brainstormed with anyone who’d ever investigated anything linked to prostitution in the Buffalo area,” she said. “I was called in because I’d been involved with the INS on cases that had involved East European gangs smuggling prostitutes into the U.S. across the Canadian border at Niagara Falls.”

“So what about Styebeck?”

“His name came up as a suspect through a vehicle connected to him. By the way, how did you get his initials?”

“Let’s just say I had another source,” he said. “Can you tell me how they connected Styebeck to the case?”

“That information came from hookers. First they saw Bernice arguing with another woman, then they saw Styebeck talking with Bernice Hogan before she vanished. The car’s plate was recorded through a security camera from a building on Niagara. The vehicle was a rental and the rental agency confirmed the renter was Karl Styebeck.”

“So, there’s no doubt he was on the suspect list?”

“None. Zero.”

“But Styebeck’s friends at the meeting got pissed off, said Brent’s statements came from crackhead hoes, and discredited the information. They said Styebeck was likely doing outreach work for his church, or one of his charities. The guy’s a beloved hero. Anyway, his pals appear to be winning support to downplay, or even remove, Styebeck as a suspect.”

“This is dangerous stuff.”

“I thought so, and what troubled me was that I’d heard similar accusations about Styebeck years ago from my confidential informants when I was working the INS case,” Clark said. “I talked to Styebeck back then and got a bad read off of him. Hero or not, he gave me the creeps.”

Clark gazed at the headstones.

“Believe it or not, I was going to call you,” she said.

She gave Gannon a few moments to absorb everything.

“Jack, what’s going on?”

“Somebody high up in police circles called the publisher this morning. They said my story was a fabrication and pressed the paper to retract it. My editors wanted me to name my source.”

“Did you?”

“No. Normally, I would. I’m supposed to tell an editor.”

“So why did you protect me?”

“I don’t trust Nate Fowler, my managing editor. Rumor is, he’s going to make cuts at the paper then take a hefty severance package. A while back, our Washington bureau chief told me Fowler’s going to make a run for office. Maybe the senate or Congress. I think that if I gave him your name, Adell, he’d give you up to ingratiate himself with influential law enforcement types.”

“I could be charged, you know.”

“I know.”

“I could lose custody of my daughter, lose my disability benefits, which are still in dispute. I’d lose everything.”

“That’s why I refused to give you up.”

“So what happened?”

“I’ve been suspended without pay.”

Clark looked off into the distance.

“I’m so sorry, Jack.”

“Don’t be.”

“No matter what anybody says, Styebeck’s a suspect. That’s a fact. And it remains a fact unless they clear him or charge him.”

Clark pressed her hands against the bench, leaning on it hard as she stood.

“At that meeting,” she said, “I was afraid that they were not going to look hard at Styebeck and I started to feel guilty.”

“Why?”

“When I’d heard these stories about Styebeck before, I did nothing. Now …” She turned away. “Jack, if you saw the crime-scene pictures of what Bernice Hogan’s killer did to her … I can’t explain it. Dammit, I helped you because I believed it was the right thing to do.”

A few tense moments passed.

“Thank you for protecting me.”

She touched his shoulder, offered him a weak smile, and then made her way to her car.

Gannon watched her drive off.

He sat alone in the Garden of Consolation, where stone angels watched over him and the dead as he contemplated his next move.

His cell phone rang.

“It’s me,” Adell Clark said. “Just heard on WBEN that there’s a news conference at eleven on the Hogan murder, out at Clarence Barracks.”

“Any idea what it’s about?”

“I don’t know, maybe they’ve got a break in the case.”

“Thanks, Adell. Gotta go.”

As he jogged to his car, Gannon checked his watch. He had just enough time to get out there.

The lot at Clarence Barracks was filled with TV trucks and news cars from the Buffalo News, WBEN, Niagara Falls, Batavia, Lockport, campus newspapers and the community Hornet chain, when Gannon arrived.

Indignation pricked at him when he saw a car from the Buffalo Sentinel. Who’d they send? Walking by the Sentinel’s Saturn, he glanced inside for a clue as to who it might be. He saw nothing. Forget it. Besides, he was here on his own, a freelancer.

Inside, he went to the woman at reception, who’d replaced the one he’d encountered earlier.