Viper - Michael Morley [146]
Sal sat and figured things out. Valsi would be in the thick of it. Stirring up bad blood. Serving his own purposes.
He should have killed the young piece of shit, instead of Donatello. If only he’d trusted his instincts instead of doing as the Don had instructed him. But that’s what Sal did. He followed orders. Always did as he was told. And now loyalty to the Family was going to get him killed.
Well, not if he could help it. Certainly not without taking some of the bastards down with him.
What about Gina? What about Enzo? Valsi wouldn’t hurt his kid, not the boy. But he wasn’t sure about Gina. He’d seen him with women, seen the violence, seen the brutality in his fists and in his heart.
The Don would want her protected. Keep an eye on her, Sal. Look after her like she was your own daughter. That’s what the Don had asked him to do in the past. And he had done it. Best he could.
Now there was only one way to truly protect her. And it didn’t involve running, or hiding. It involved what Sal did best.
Killing.
101
Stazione dei carabinieri, Castello di Cisterna
The case conference continued at a slow, methodical pace. Nothing was to be missed. Every link scrupulously examined. A mistake now could prove fatal.
Sylvia was growing tired and short-tempered. ‘I asked for checks on Celia Brabantia, the former manager of the Finelli sex centre. Is she dead or alive?’
Claudio Mancini hesitated. ‘Alive. We think.’
‘You think?’ queried Sylvia. ‘Alive is when you breathe, dead is when you don’t. Which is it, Claudio?’
‘One of the women said she’d quit and moved home to Sansepolcro. She gave us a number and we spoke to a woman who said she was her, but we haven’t yet had a chance to physically ID her, so we think she is alive but can’t be certain.’
‘Okay, we get the picture, thanks.’ Sylvia rubbed at her hair and paced while she thought. ‘Susanna, update us on the body count and body IDs. Where do we stand? Who’s linked to whom?’
Susanna Martinelli was a tall, thin confident woman in her late twenties with long black curly hair that shook from side to side as she walked to the front. She picked up the projector control and began with the slides of the dead cousins, Paolo Falconi and Franco Castellani. ‘Their deaths now seem like a single planned suicide by the elder cousin, Franco, a heroin user, that went wrong and ended in a double tragedy. Onlookers say the younger cousin, Paolo, tried to stop him and was accidentally killed.’
Sylvia stepped across the conversation. ‘We’ve been considering these two as suspects in our murder cases. It could be that Franco Castellani had planned to kill himself out of shame or guilt and he bungled the suicide and shot Paolo Falconi as well.’
Susanna continued her narrative. ‘I’ve been asked to put up these slides as well.’ She clicked on to several images of the cousins’ bodies being examined by a well-built, middle-aged man in a grey suit.
‘Salvatore Giacomo, aka Sal the Snake,’ explained Lorenzo from the shadows of the room. ‘Fredo Finelli’s personal muscle. We want to know why he was there. What’s his connection with the cousins? Had he been told to threaten them, abduct them or even kill them? We have information – which, unfortunately, I can’t go into at this moment – that suggests there was bad blood between Sal’s boss, Fredo Finelli, and their grandfather, Antonio Castellani. Was Sal following the cousins on Finelli’s instructions?’
Jack’s eyes were glued to the frame of Giacomo. This was a man who had slipped under their radar for most of the inquiry. No criminal record. Yet he was a career criminal who was certainly smart and efficient. He ticked a lot of boxes on Jack’s profile. ‘Lorenzo, is this Sal a local? Was he born and bred around here?’
Pisano didn’t need any notes to help him. He knew the background on the Finelli Family