Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [81]
Stubbornness was an unfortunate trait in all of them. The husband and wife would not talk, and Thomas Kind was determined to have answers and would not leave without them. His questions were simple: who were the people in the ambulance? and where had they gone?
It had only been when Kind pressed a two-shot .44 magnum derringer against Signora Caputo’s forehead that Ettore suddenly had had the urge to talk. Who the patient or passengers were he had no idea. The driver was a man named Luca Fanari, a former carabiniere and licensed ambulance driver who worked for him from time to time. Luca had rented the ambulance from him earlier that week and for an unspecified period of time. Where he had gone with it, he did not know.
Thomas Kind pressed the derringer a little more firmly against Signora Caputo’s head and asked again.
“Call Fanari’s wife, for God’s sake!” the signora shouted.
Ninety seconds later Caputo hung up the phone. Luca Fanari’s wife had given him a telephone number and an address where to reach her husband, warning him that neither was to be given out under any circumstance whatsoever.
Luca Fanari, Caputo said, had driven his patient north. To a private home. Just outside the town of Cortona.
STREAKS OF DAYLIGHT crossed the sky as Thomas Kind slipped over the wall and approached the house from behind. He wore tight gloves, steel-colored jeans, a dark sweater, and black running shoes. One of the Walther MPKs was in his hand, the other hung from a strap over his shoulder. Both were mounted with silencers. He looked like a commando; which, at this moment, he was.
In front of him he could see the beige Iveco ambulance parked near the side door. Five minutes later he had searched the entire house. It was empty.
52
Rome. 7:00 A.M.
HARRY HAD SEEN THE VIDEO CLIP ON AN English-language channel an hour earlier—a Hollywood trade paper photograph of Byron Willis, exterior shots of their Beverly Hills office building and of Byron’s home in Bel Air. His friend, boss, and mentor had been shot to death as he arrived at his home Thursday night. Because of his association with Harry and the events concurrent in Italy, the police had withheld the news pending further inquiry. The FBI was now involved, and investigators from Gruppo Cardinale were expected to arrive in Los Angeles later in the day.
Stunned, horrified, Harry had taken the chance and called Adrianna’s office, leaving word to have her call Elmer Vasko immediately. And she had, from Athens an hour later. She’d just returned from the island of Cyprus, where she’d covered a major confrontation between Greek and Turkish politicians and had only just learned of the Willis piece herself and tried to find out more before she called him.
“Did it have to do with me, with what the fuck is going on here in Italy?” Harry was angry and bitter and fighting to hold back tears.
“Nobody knows yet. But—“
“But what, for Chrissake?”
“From what I understand, it looked like a professional hit.”
“… God, why?” he whispered. “He didn’t know anything.”
Pulling himself back, fighting off the dark swirl of emotion, Harry asked her what the status was in the hunt for his brother. Her response was that the police had no leads, that nothing had changed. It was why she hadn’t called.
Harry’s world was collapsing around him in violence. He’d wanted to call Barbara Willis, Byron’s widow. To talk to her, to somehow touch her, try to comfort her and share her terrible pain. He’d wanted to call Willis’s senior partners Bill Rosenfeld and Penn Barry to find out what the hell happened. But he couldn’t. Not by phone or fax or even E-mail without fear it would be traced to where he was. But he couldn’t sit still either; if Danny was alive, it was only a matter of time before they got to him just as they got to Byron Willis. Instantly