Chapter Six

Campbell

THE FED IN front of me is a new face: Frank Amato, supervisory special agent. His brief exchange with Ryan set him a link above her on the chain; barely caged disdain made it clear she doesn’t think Amato deserves the privilege.

He fits perfectly in this crooked little room, clean-cut black hair slicked to the root, watery blue eyes like pieces of sea glass washed up from the refuse of soda bottles and industrial waste. At one-thirty in the morning, Amato should have a swath of five o’clock shadow framing his chin, but he ran a razor over his face before coming in here. I can smell the musk and witch hazel of bottom shelf aftershave, the implied power play behind the gesture. He has me ragged and tired, but he wants to look like a man in control, no matter the hour.

“How about we get started?” He taps a manila folder between his hands against the table, rustling a thick sheaf of papers inside. “Despite the circumstances, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been waiting a long time for this—”

Static. A shorter burst this time, high-pitched and mocking.

Sofia’s palm hits the table with twice the force. “Agent Amato, if you use that name to refer to my client one more time, I will be a tumor in your life and your career. I will visit every possible pain, annoyance, and frustration upon you until you’re trying to dig me out with a scalpel and salvage the bloody husk that’s left behind. I will become stage four fucking cancer every moment you are awake. Is that clear?”

Amato stares at her, but Sofia doesn’t blink. He does, close to a flinch, and has to stop to clear his throat. “All right.”

She really is like family sometimes.

“I assume you prefer ‘Campbell’, then?” he asks.

I’d prefer to take the pen next to Amato’s hand and drive it through one of his eyes a centimeter at a time until the inkwell fills with vitreous humor, but life is a series of trade-offs. “Yes.”

He opens the folder, revealing an incident report at the top. “Then how about you tell me where you were the night of June 19th this year, Campbell?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Sofia interrupts.

She knows exactly where I was. After setting up La Rosa’s death, I had to rescue Sofia from the Galici capos holding her hostage in her own house. Unfortunately, the truth makes for a poor alibi. Assisting my lawyer with a crime puts a gaping hole in the otherwise unassailable shield of privileged communication.

“Because we believe you were at Ditmars setting one hell of a fire.” Amato taps the report under his fingertips. “Burning two people alive. And not just any two people—Miceli La Rosa and his wife. Big target, going for the Sicilian Mafia’s uncrowned king.”

If he expects recognition, I won’t give him any. “That’s ridiculous.”

“If you have even a shred of evidence, now is the time,” Sofia adds. “Because if you ordered extradition without a bulletproof case, my next step after leaving this building is filing a civil suit.”

Amato relaxes back in his chair and smirks. “We have physical evidence. And a witness.”

That is impossible.

Sofia raises a brow. “Enlighten me.”

“An attendant at a gas station six blocks away from La Rosa’s estate saw someone matching Campbell’s description using the self-checkout two hours before the fire. They bought a full can of fuel, used cash, and avoided the cameras. We found the can in a city dumpster, ran the gas chromatograph, and wouldn’t you know it? A match to the accelerant, with a nice full fingerprint on the very bottom.”

I always wear gloves. There isn’t a single moment in time where I was near La Rosa where my hands weren’t covered. Only an amateur would source their materials within walking distance of a target, and I don’t do fires to begin with. They’re unreliable at the best of times for damage to both property and people.

Thankfully, I don’t have to say any of this to Sofia out loud.

“If even half of that is true, it would be devastating,” she says. “So why did the FBI sit on such valuable evidence for six months? I read the papers, Amato. The mayor has been climbing up NYPD’s ass to find a single person of interest in this case, and no one ever showed.”

“We were looking for motive. A man at the top of the Mafia chain dies, and it could be anything—a power struggle, a paid hit, a personal score.” He flips to the next section in his folder. “You were in the military, weren’t you, Campbell?”

The page under his fingertips is the cover sheet for my personnel file, so there’s little point in deflecting the question. “US Army. Four years.”

“Your record is impeccable for a single tour. Good Conduct medal. Valorous Unit citation. Three expert marksmanship badges. Strange that they had you carrying around dead bodies while you were such a good shot.”

Amato draws his finger down the page, then stops. His eyes lock with mine.

“Maybe it’s related to the one psychological incident you have on record.”

Sofia frowns, and I have to snuff out a flare of anger before it rises to the surface. She doesn’t know about this. No one is supposed to.

That record is sealed. The black mark was expunged after I lied my way through a wellness exam, then stayed on good behavior until earning an honorable discharge. Sure, the FBI might have been able to crack the lock by talking to someone in the Army, but how did they even know to look?

“The incident was resolved,” I say. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“You were found standing outside your commanding officer’s quarters covered in blood, screaming that you were going to kill him.” Amato shrugs. “A threat like that sounds pretty straightforward to me.”

I don’t even remember the night it happened. Seventy-two hours awake, separating a stew of gore and debris into the people I had shared breakfast with every day became a void at hour seventy-three. The darkness kept hold until a couple of MPs threw me in the drunk tank on base, but my blood alcohol was zero point zero.

The uniformed psych they put me with explained what I did in careful terms, laying out a path of excuses. Grief did things to people, but they were temporary. I was a fine young soldier with a whole career waiting in the wings. What truly mattered was that there weren’t any other mortuary staff on that side of the Red Sea, and new bodies kept coming in every day. No one else wanted the responsibility.

So I cleaned up, wrote a formal apology to my CO, and went back to work.

I was broken. Compound fractures across personality, emotion, memory. No one in the service cared that I couldn’t feel anything anymore, so long as I followed orders. I knew better than to tell anyone about the dreams that came after, where slaughter became seductive, beautiful. Two of those marksmanship awards were given out on days where I pictured a familiar face on every target, listening to cheers before landing a kill shot.

“Several members of my unit had just died,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking straight. Nothing more to it.”

“Death doesn’t seem to bother you much since you went into the private military business afterward. Bet it paid well, killing on command.” Amato smiles. “And now you consult on matters of security. Sole proprietorship.”

I won’t debate him about my mercenary days. It was brutal, monstrous, and perfectly legal. “A lot of veterans do the same thing.”

“Not like you.” He leans forward, looking far too chipper for the hour. “See, I looked into it. Most of the money in that business comes from the Middle East. You haven’t been to any of those countries since you dropped the fatigues.”

What a smug little insect.

“Ever served, Amato?”

“Campbell,” Sofia warns.

“Maybe not you,” I add. “Your father, grandfather. Anyone?”

His smile shrinks by a couple of teeth. “No. Never.”

“Then don’t play patriot at me, Agent.” Real anger suffuses my voice; I can’t numb the reflex. “The least I could do after signing up to be part of that fuel-hungry genocide was never, ever showing my face in Afghanistan again. Or Iraq. Or Pakistan.”

Amato scoffs. “You weren’t infantry. You were doing funerals.”

“Every corpse I sent home with a flag on the casket was an excuse to ship ten more soldiers out to the killing field.” And I stayed, wearing the uniform. Redemption has always been out of the question; I’m not looking for sympathy. “At least in the private sector, I was in a very different part of the world putting bullets in militias that got their kicks through torture and rape. A couple years of that, and I could finally sleep again.”

Sofia digs one of her heels into the top of my bare foot. “Campbell. Stop.”

“Don’t fret, Ms. Cattaneo. They aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know.” Paper whispers on paper as he flips through the file. “But I’ll tell you what I think, Campbell, and what the FBI intends to prove. You murder for hire. You’re very good at it. And someone contracted you to kill Miceli La Rosa and his wife.”

Three out of four isn’t bad. I’m more concerned that someone seems to have framed me for Giovanna’s death, because whoever is responsible knew exactly when and where to place the evidence. I suspected the police were staking out Miceli’s estate after I broke in the first time, but I could never prove it. If it wasn’t them, then it’s the Mafia, and why would they want the feds to know La Rosa had been murdered?

“I wasn’t aware the Bureau was hiring people with such colorful imaginations these days,” Sofia says. “My client is a tax-paying citizen without so much as a single traffic ticket. I’ll believe you have a witness when they actually testify. And a single fingerprint on a can at a gas station anyone could have put their hands on isn’t enough evidence for a first-year mock trial, much less a federal indictment. If that’s all you have, you’ll lose your badge.”

Amato chuckles. “Oh, don’t worry. We’re just getting started.”

He pulls out a photograph clipped between two sheets of paper and pushes it across the table. I don’t recognize the picture itself, but the subject matter is intimately familiar.

A man sits slack in a wooden chair, an artifact from the seventies with a creaking seat. The damn thing made constant noise while I was working a makeshift garotte under his Adam’s apple, choking and releasing until the cycle of friction split sweat-soaked skin. Days after death, he has the color of rotten fish, bloodless white swelling to corpulent blue, the disfiguring gas of decomposition pushing bright green eyes halfway out of their sockets.

It took a while for Mickey Galici’s family to find him.

“This is where it all began, isn’t it?” Amato asks.

Well, then. I might actually be in trouble.