Jake stood in the hallway outside the interrogation room, hung up his cell phone, stashed it back in his pocket. Through the one-way window he saw Calvin Hewlitt sitting at the conference table, buzzing with anger and shepherded by the pinch-faced lawyer who’d arrived in a flurry of briefcase and demands. Jake had left them to stew with DeLuca. The Siskels needed to know what he’d discovered.
He still felt the weight of the phone call he’d just made to Catherine Siskel. There would be more to come, especially in the fight over the subpoena for the City Hall surveillance. But since Jake and the Siskels had nailed Dahlstrom and his co-conspirators Hewlitt and Bartoneri with their greenroom trap, it turned out the forbidden tape wasn’t needed to clinch that case.
As he’d told Catherine Siskel, they simply needed Brileen Finnerty. If she’d turn state’s evidence, she’d be their star witness. Now, with Finnerty as potential ammunition, Jake was about to fire his final shot. He entered interrogation room C. Endgame.
Hewlitt’s attorney stood, as if some “round two” bell had clanged. “Detectives, we’re ready to provide certain information,” she said, flapping over a page of her yellow pad, “in return for—”
“That’s not how it works, Ms. O’Shaughnessy.” Jake clanked open a battered folding chair but didn’t sit. “Information first, then we go to the DA. As you are well aware. Ready, Mr. Hewlitt?”
Jake had seen this look before, the deflating of arrogance, the collapsing of ego, the cold realization that whatever a suspect had believed about his own invulnerability, it was defeated by the sometimes successful system of justice.
Sometimes, like today, it worked.
“Hewlitt?” Jake said. “Again, this is all being recorded. First. You’re Hugh, correct?”
The lawyer gestured a weary hand toward her client.
“Whatever.”
“That a yes?” DeLuca sat the end of the table, one ankle on the other knee. He pointed toward a microphone mounted in the corner. “You have to say it out loud, Hewlitt. You know how tape works, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Hewlitt said to the corner.
And it was yes that Angie Bartoneri was in cahoots with Hewlitt and Dahlstrom. Hewlitt had explained she’d hired a street guy named Rodney Field to do the money-for-thumb-drive exchange.
“All he had to do was take the fricking bag,” Hewlitt complained. “It wasn’t my fault he went nuts when Siskel refused to pay. He’d put a fricking phone book in the bag to make it look heavy. Field told me he thought it meant he wouldn’t get paid. Fricking crankhead. I told you the truth! I told you he was the bad guy. Remember? You should charge Field with murder, not me.”
“Mr. Field is dead,” Jake reminded him. Angie was, too, professionally and personally.
DeLuca leaned toward Hewlitt, pointing. “After we stopped you from trying to kill Rodney Field, you knew Angie Bartoneri would make sure of it.”
And then Jake saw the whole thing, how even though relying on surveillance felt reliable, felt unassailable—in reality, it wasn’t.
“Think of it, Hewlitt,” Jake said. “If you’d succeeded? You’d have been the hero. Catching the Curley Park killer. And the surveillance tapes would have proved you right. Except they’d be wrong.”
“Screw you, Officer,” Hewlitt said.
Jake shot D a look. Don’t.
“Nice mouth,” DeLuca said instead. “Getting ready for lockup?”
“We’re done.” Hewlitt’s lawyer stood, flapped her legal pad closed. “I’ll wait for your call, Brogan.”
In fifteen minutes, Hewlitt was in custody, DeLuca at his desk with one last assignment, and Jake in his car. He pulled out of the HQ parking lot. Four hours until takeoff. But this damn case still bugged the hell out of him.
The whole crime was caught on camera, Catherine Siskel had admitted it, all on the illicit City Hall video. At least now they knew what it meant. But according to the supe, Mayor Holbrooke and the lawyer Kelli Riordan had already called, strong-arming them to withdraw the subpoena, demanding that the police superintendent, a mayoral appointee, keep the taping confidential. The supe had ordered Jake—“for now”—not to mention it. Jake wouldn’t be surprised if the supe had known about it all along. But the cover-up appeared to be under way.
That was way above Jake’s pay grade. He wasn’t sure how he felt about caving to City Hall, but he’d decided not to think about it. For the next four days, at least.
But he had one more thing on his preflight checklist. One last bit of police work before he turned off his brain.
Angie Bartoneri. What had happened to twist her from ambitious young cop to a jaded manipulative…? Well, greed, he guessed. Power. Ego. A destructive combination. And in a cop, especially dangerous. She’d even leaked information to the media. Unforgivable.
She’d admitted she’d tried to cover up Greg Siskel’s identity to give her crew time to get their stories straight. But was she complicit in murder? Though Jake’s crime scene guys were on it, there was no real evidence to link her to Bobby Land’s death. Jake needed a smoking gun to put her away forever.
He stopped at the light at Beacon Street, pulled out his cell phone, scrolled to D’s speed dial.
“Anything?” he said.
“You oughta be a cop,” DeLuca said. “Guess our Ms. Bartoneri forgot there was surveillance video in the back of the ambulance. We got her dead to rights, yanking out the poor tattoo guy’s oxygen tubes. She put ’em back just as they arrived at Mass General. And Jake? Get this. It also shows her swiping his ID. She probably took Greg Siskel’s, too. And his phone. She just couldn’t know he’d hidden the thumb drive in his shoe. She was there, right?”
“So…” Jake smiled, listening as D explained. “Live by the sword, you know?”
“Yup,” DeLuca said. “What you see is what you get.”
“What Angie Bartoneri gets is murder one,” Jake said.