Judge & Jury - James Patterson [68]
Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew I was out of the game—that I couldn’t touch him, whatever he said or did. I clenched my fists and felt the blood surging through my veins.
“I told him you needed to know and it was urgent,” Frank Delsavio said, still chuckling. “He told me to send you his regards. He said to make sure I said that—those exact words. End of the earth. ‘Come and get me, Nicky Smiles.’ ”
Part Three
THE EEL
Chapter 85
YOU NEVER QUITE KNOW when the breakthrough comes, that one, case-altering clue. Usually it’s not an ahha! Just someone talking to someone else, rolling over to escape prison time. Sometimes it’s one of those moments, though. A blur in a sky full of shining stars that all at once takes shape and becomes stunningly clear.
For me, that moment came while watching the courthouse tape. Those forty-seven seconds I’d been over so many times.
A buddy in C-10 kept me going with updates on the case for old times’ sake. A female court employee named Monica Ann Romano had been found murdered the day after Cavello’s escape, and they were looking into it. Her mother said she’d been seeing someone. She’d never met him—nor had Monica Ann’s friends at work—but she knew he had an accent of some kind. The cops were thinking she may have been blackmailed into planting a gun inside the courthouse.
The getaway Bronco had been ripped apart for prints and DNA. The house where Denunziatta’s sister had been killed turned up nothing. The neighborhood around Paterson, New Jersey, was being canvassed. Every toll camera on I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike was being reviewed.
It was the middle of the night when I found it. I hadn’t been able to sleep.
I was at my desk on my computer, going through the courthouse tape for maybe the thousandth time. I had printed off the face of the guy with the beard to show to Ogilov, running over what leverage I could apply. Which was basically none.
I’d let the tape roll to the end. My eyes were growing heavy. It was after two in the morning. I needed a little sleep. I made a move to rewind.
Then suddenly, I stopped.
I blinked. It was a eureka sensation, as though I’d just found a cure for cancer or a deadly virus. There it was.
I leaned forward, panning in with the remote on the accomplice with the beard. But not his face this time—or the gun or his watch—things that were already burned into my memory.
On the sonovabitch’s shoes.
I pressed the remote, zooming in on the shoes. I was wide-eyed now. There was a distinct rubber logo above the heel.
Some kind of circle—with a wavy line bisecting it.
Jesus, Nick! Why hadn’t I seen this before?
I knew those shoes.
My chest started to pound. Three years before I had made a special trip to the Middle East, to train inspectors.
The shoes were Israeli-made. For the Israeli Army. For extra support.
I had even worn them when I was there.
Chapter 86
CAVELLO’S ACCOMPLICE had to be Israeli. I actually had something.
The frustration of losing that black Bronco was fading away.
It was almost morning. It took another cup of strong coffee to keep me focused, but I started going back through the books of terror suspects I had gotten from Homeland Security. I felt I had something to fix on. The needle in the haystack had just gotten a bit larger. Most faces appeared to be Middle Eastern, but I leafed past those. I was looking for a European. I had an approximate height and weight.
Three o’clock turned into three thirty. Then four. There were books and books of faces to scan through. Hundreds. Pakistanis, Basque separatists, al Qaeda sympathizers, FALN. IRA. All were on some kind of terror-watch radar. All had been thought to be in the country at some time. Many had explosives knowledge. Four started to bump up to five. I never even noticed when the first rays of light hit my window.
Then something made me stop. I came upon someone else. Maybe I’d passed him before. Maybe I’d passed the face a dozen times.