Quinn - Iris Johansen [68]
But first she’d go over the Gallo information as she’d meant to do when she’d first driven up to the cabin. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened the folder she’d taken from her knapsack.
She knew most of it by heart, but there might be something she’d missed. Some of the information she’d gathered from various intelligence agencies. Some were notes about details Eve had told her about Gallo during the period she’d known him as a young girl.
Those Eve notes were very short and to the point. She’d lived in a housing project in Atlanta. At sixteen, she’d met John Gallo, who had recently moved down to the neighborhood from Milwaukee so that his uncle could get medical treatment from the local veterans’ hospital. She’d become impregnated during the four weeks they were together before he’d left to join the Army. After that time, she had not seen him again and had been told by his uncle, Ted Danner, that he’d been killed on a mission to North Korea. She’d given birth to her daughter, Bonnie, and her life had gone on without John Gallo or contact with his uncle.
All brief, cool, and cut-and-dried. Yet Catherine was sure that there was nothing cool or unemotional about that period between Gallo and Eve. Even as a sixteen-year-old, Eve would have been strong and in control, and for her to be careless and become pregnant would be unlikely. Eve had told her there had been no emotional bond between her and Gallo, and that it had been a purely sexual relationship. But that sexual affair had been enough for Eve to take a chance that would change her life forever.
And Gallo had been the catalyst.
She took out the picture of Gallo taken when he had gone into the Army.
Olive skin, dark eyes, a full sensual mouth, a faint indentation in his chin. Yes, stunning good looks. Mature for his nineteen years. Anyone could see why a woman would be drawn to him.
And the brief glimpse she’d had of the older John Gallo had been even more impressive. A streak of silver in that dark hair, wariness, confidence born of experience … and yet still that hint of recklessness. And a personality so strong that he had managed to persuade Eve that he was innocent when she’d found out he was still alive and a suspect in her daughter’s murder.
Innocent and able to point the way to a suitable substitute, Paul Black.
“You’re quite a spellbinder, John Gallo,” she murmured. “Now what can I do to break that spell and bring you down?”
She switched to the intelligence reports on Gallo. He had been a Ranger who had been sent with two other soldiers into North Korea by Army Intelligence officers Nate Queen and Thomas Jacobs on a supposed mission to retrieve a ledger with information regarding North Korea’s attempts to acquire nuclear materials. The mission had gone south and he had hidden the ledger before he was captured. He had been thrown into a prison and undergone deprivation and torture for seven years before he escaped. In the hospital in Tokyo he had been diagnosed as mentally unstable, a schizophrenic with frequent blackouts. Yet Queen and Jacobs had taken him out of the hospital and continued to use him in their intelligence missions abroad. Catherine had thought it bizarre the first time she’d learned about it. The action stank of a suicide mission. But Gallo had survived and learned that Queen was dirty, involved in drugs and smuggling. He had retrieved the ledger from Korea.
The ledger.
Catherine flipped back to the statement Eve had given her about the story Gallo had told her about the ledger. It had proved to be evidence of Queen’s and Jacobs’s involvement in the drug trade and had been held by a North Korean officer who had been their partner. Gallo had used it to blackmail Queen to make them release him from those missions that were becoming increasingly deadly in nature.