Cross - James Patterson [67]
He read the pages—then handed them to me.
“I didn’t think the Mafia was active in the DC area,” Sampson said. “Guess I was wrong. You’re both soldiers in the mob. Either of you have anything to say about what was going down in that alley?”
They didn’t, and they were annoyingly smug about not answering our questions and pretending we weren’t even there.
“Dr. Cross, maybe we can work this out without their help. What do you think?” Sampson asked me.
“We can try. It says here that John ‘Digger’ Antonelli and Joseph ‘Blade’ Lanugello work for Maggione out of New York City. That would be Maggione Jr. Maggione Sr. was the one who hired a man named Michael Sullivan, also known as the Butcher, to do a hit in DC several years back. You remember that one, John?”
“I do. Took out a Chinese drug dealer. Your wife, Maria, was also murdered right around that time. Mr. Sullivan is now a suspect in this case.”
“This same Michael ‘the Butcher’ Sullivan is also a suspect in a series of rapes in Georgetown, and at least one murder connected to the rapes. Was Sullivan the man you had cornered in Blues Alley?” I asked the Mafia hitters.
Not a word came from either of them. Nothing at all. Real tough guys.
Sampson finally stood up, rubbing his chin. “So I guess we don’t need Digger and Blade anymore. Well, what should we do with them? Wait, I have an idea. You’ll like this one, Alex,” Sampson said, and chuckled to himself.
He motioned for the Mafia soldiers to get up. “We’re finished here. You can come with me, gentlemen.”
“Where?” Lanugello finally broke his silence. “You ain’t charged us yet.”
“Let’s go. Got a surprise for you.” Sampson walked in front of the two of them, and I walked behind. They didn’t seem to like having me at the rear. Maybe they thought I might still be harboring a grudge about what had happened to Maria. Well, maybe I was.
Sampson signaled a guard at the end of the hall, and he used his keys to open a cell door. The holding area was already filled with several prisoners awaiting arraignment. All but one of them was black. John led the way inside.
“You’ll be staying here. If you change your mind and want to talk to us,” Sampson said to the Mafia guys, “give a holler. That is if Dr. Cross and I are still in the building. If not, we’ll check in on you in the morning. If that’s the case, have a nice night.”
Sampson tapped his shield a few times against the bars of the holding pen. “These two men are suspects in a series of rapes,” he announced to the other prisoners. “Rapes of black women in Southeast. Be careful, though, these are tough guys. From New York.”
We left, and the lockup guard slammed the cell door behind us.
Chapter 89
FOUR O’CLOCK ON A COLD, rainy morning, and his two younger boys were crying their eyes out in the backseat of the car. So was Caitlin up in front. Sullivan blamed Junior Maggione and La Cosa Nostra for everything, the huge, ugly mess that was happening now. Somehow, Maggione was going to pay for this, and he looked forward to the day of retribution.
So did his scalpel and his butcher’s saw.
At two thirty in the morning he had piled his family into the car and snuck away from a house six miles outside Wheeling, West Virginia. It was their second move in as many weeks, but he had no choice in the matter. He’d promised the boys they would return to Maryland one day, but he knew that wasn’t true. They wouldn’t ever go back to Maryland. Sullivan already had an offer on the house there. He needed the cash for their escape plan.
So now he and the family were running for their lives. As they left their “Wild West Virginny Home,” as he called it, he had a feeling that the mob would find them again—that they could be right around the next bend in the road.
But he rounded the next curve, and the curve after that, and made it out of town safe and sound and in one piece. Soon they were singing Rolling Stones and ZZ Top tunes, including about a twenty-minute version