“I can’t believe you are letting Jake in there with Marino. He’ll kill him.” Sam paced Robinson’s office as the captain took a seat behind his desk.
“Frank is keeping an eye on him. He won’t let things get out of control.”
“Murphy’s okay with this? He’ll fire Jake and Marino will still have his job. That’s just great.”
Robinson pulled out a chair and pointed. He didn’t want to tell her that Murphy practically gave his blessing and his only warning to Jake was not to leave any noticeable injuries. “Sit. If you think the chief doesn’t know what’s going on then you missed the little hand signal he gave when he left the room.”
Sam sat down and tried to quell her fears. “What if they have to carry Marino out on a stretcher? What if he goes to the media or worse, presses charges against Jake? Aren’t you worried?”
“Not in the least. I predict Marino won’t have a mark on his body. At least we now know neither of the Reveres nor Bordeau assaulted you, but we still have to prove those suicides were homicides.”
Sam’s cell phone rang. She checked the screen. “It’s Abby. Hi, Mom.”
“Samantha, you received a photo faxed to you from Headquarters.”
“That’s Beast. He was going to work some magic on a photo I dropped off, make a suspect lose a hundred plus pounds.”
“It’s him, Samantha.”
“Him, who?”
“There was a phone number on the fax so I called and asked Mister Boonstra to send the photo to Jacob’s email address.”
“Mom, whose photo?”
“The man, Samantha. The man we saw in the grocery store.”
<><>
Sam watched Sal Marino crawl out of the interview room. He wasn’t on all fours but he may as well have been. His steps were timid, face drained of all color. Marino trembled as though the Ghost of Christmas Future had just visited him and the prediction wasn’t pretty.
“I don’t get it. He isn’t bloody, nothing looks broken, cut, or bruised.” Sam turned to Frank. “What happened in there?”
“If I tell you, he’ll have to kill me.” But Frank was too chatty to let it go. “Jake promised to show me how pressure on a certain nerve can paralyze someone, make him feel as though he were just zapped with a Taser. Damn it was priceless. As you can tell the ass had to wait in that room until he regained his composure. He was crying like a baby. Almost wet himself.”
Sam turned to Jake, ready to interrogate him, but the photo on his screen stopped her cold. “Oh my god. Mom was right. That’s him. Gary Staples was the man Abby and I saw at the store. Why didn’t his prints on the soup cans identify him?”
“Doesn’t have a record. He’s never been fingerprinted.” Robinson waited for the photo to spit off the color printer. They were gathered behind Jake’s chair as phones and normal morning routines buzzed around them. Sam studied Jake wondering exactly how dangerous of a man she had married. Robinson snatched the photo from the printer. “Get this photo over to that clinic and find out exactly what those guys know about Mister Staples.”
“Wait!” Jake grabbed the photo and studied it, remembering the film from Bailey’s. “I remember him. I could swear he was seated at the bar the night Donna had her run-in with Austin Revere.”