Storm Rising

by Douglas Schofield

  “When will I hear from you?”

  “Soon.” He wrote a number on the back of his business card. “That’s my cell. Don’t bother with the switchboard, just call me on that number. Just a sec…” He flipped through a diary on his desk. “I’m clear next Friday. Call me on Thursday afternoon and we can arrange to meet.”

  He walked her to the entrance. Before they parted, he casually asked, “By the way, did you make a copy of that flash drive for yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  He cocked his head. “And, don’t tell me! You hid it in a heating duct.”

  Despite herself, Lucy laughed. “No! It’s on my laptop.”

  His quick grin turned serious. “Is it password protected?”

  “No.”

  “Do that when you get home.”

  “Okay.”

  “At this point, you don’t know who you can trust. So I suggest you keep all this to yourself.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  They said their goodbyes, and she left the building.

  As Lucy walked to her car, she caught herself smiling. Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Robert Olivetti was an attractive man.

  It had been a long time since a thought like that had crossed her mind.

  * * *

  Olivetti was as good as his word. When she called him late on Thursday, he asked her to come to his office at four o’clock the next day.

  “How long will we be? I’ll need to pick up my son by six.”

  “We have a few things to discuss. Can you make other arrangements?”

  “I may be able to get his daycare teacher to keep him for an extra hour or so.”

  “Okay. If we need more time, maybe we can get together on the weekend.”

  After she hung up, Lucy wondered if Robert Olivetti had just maneuvered her into something vaguely resembling a date.

  When she arrived at his office on the following afternoon, the receptionist told her to go right in. “He’s waiting for you,” the woman said.

  When she appeared in his doorway, Olivetti smiled, got up, and came around his desk to greet her. He gestured at two document boxes on the floor behind his desk.

  “That’s the Jersey City PD file on Jack’s murder,” he said. “I’ve been reviewing it.”

  “I thought you didn’t want the police involved.”

  “The file was in storage at our facility in Secaucus. I used a back channel to get it, so there wouldn’t be any paperwork.” He paused, then continued. “The fact that it was in storage up there was interesting in itself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the file should have been stored here. An unsolved case involving the murder of a cop shouldn’t have been archived. Even after five years.”

  They sat down, and Olivetti changed subjects. “I have some bad news.” Anticipating Lucy’s reaction, he quickly added, “Not about Jack’s activities—about that prisoner he was interviewing. The one who claimed to have information about Parrish. I remembered the man was a three-striker, but I couldn’t remember his name. Do you know what ‘three-striker’ means?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “His name was Thomas Mulvaney. Did Jack ever mention that name?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Back in ’06, Mulvaney was awaiting trial for armed robbery. He hadn’t made bail, so he was sitting in custody. After Jack was killed, I told the investigators about his visit to my office. I gave them Mulvaney’s name. A day or so later, they went to the jail to interview him. When they arrived, an ambulance was just leaving. Mulvaney had been stabbed in the exercise yard. He died on the way to the hospital. As usual, the other inmates all claimed they were tying their shoelaces and didn’t see a thing. The prison staff couldn’t even find the weapon—a corrupt guard was probably paid to make it disappear.”

  “You think he was killed to shut him up?”

  “Likely, but not necessarily because he’d been talking to Jack. Mulvaney was being represented in the robbery case by a lawyer from the Public Defender’s Office. He was in the process of negotiating a plea deal that would have required him to testify against his co-defendants.”

  “Were any of those co-defendants in the prison yard when it happened?”

  “One was, but there was no evidence to pin the killing on him. As I said, there was no evidence to charge anyone. When the yard was being cleared at the end of the exercise period, a guard noticed that Mulvaney wasn’t moving. He was sitting with his back against a wall, as if he was just taking a nap.”

  “If he was going to testify against the others, why wasn’t he kept separate from them? Why was that other man in the yard?”

  “A no-contact request had been submitted that same morning. The prison just didn’t act on it quickly enough.”

  “If he was killed because he was going to testify, then there must have been a leak.”

  “Not from this office. On the other hand, the Public Defender’s Office isn’t exactly the gold standard when it comes to security.”

  “So you don’t know for sure why Mulvaney was killed.”

  “No. Either he was killed by his co-accused—or by someone on their behalf—or he was killed because someone found out that he’d been talking to Jack about Cal Parrish. The Jersey City detectives couldn’t eliminate either possibility.”

  “It’s pretty clear to me that they picked the first one.”

  “You’re talking about their allegations about Jack being seen drinking with a Mob member, and the bracelet evidence suggesting that he was murdered by the Lanza family.”

  “Yes. I got the impression from Detective Scarlatti that she was only looking for evidence that confirmed what she already believed.”

  “Confirmation bias. Cops and prosecutors call it tunnel vision. But did they mention anything else? Any other evidence against Jack?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes! Why?”

  Olivetti chewed on his lip, obviously conflicted by what he was about to say.

  “What is it, Robert? Tell me!”

  “Did they tell you that Jack had been running searches on the police database for information that would be useful to organized crime?”

  Lucy was so shocked she could barely find her voice. “No!”

  “The detectives ran an analysis of Jack’s log-ins. A lot of his searches didn’t look right.”

  “Probably because of his investigation of Cal Parrish!”

  “It wasn’t that kind of information. He was searching task force operations. At that time, there were a couple of federal-state joint operations targeting organized crime.” He looked Lucy in the eye. “How would you describe Jack’s computer skills?”

  “Not great. He was always asking me to show him how to do something. Why?”

  “Not all police officers have access to every layer of the system. Detectives do, but even they aren’t permitted access to protected files without special authorization. Whoever ran these searches was walking right in.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been Jack! Someone was using his password.”

  “Did you know his password?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have a favorite song?”

  Lucy was puzzled. “He had a lot of favorite songs. I don’t understand what—?”

  “Was one of them ‘Every Breath You Take’?”

  Lucy felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

  “Yes.”

  “His password was the third line of the song: Everybondyoubreak, followed by the numbers 1979.”

  “The year I was born.”

  “The detectives figured that out.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “From what you say, it’s not a password that he would need to write down. It would be easy to remember and difficult for someone to steal.”

  “But not impossible. He could have given it to someone in a work situation, and then forgot to change it. Anyway, you said detectiv
es needed special authorization to get into certain files. So his password wouldn’t have been enough.”

  “That’s right. He’d have to know a certain key-code. Unfortunately, those codes weren’t as secure as they should have been. The evidence is that two weeks before he was killed, someone using Jack’s password was pulling up reports from a special investigation team that was targeting the Lanza family’s influence over a certain Local of the Amalgamated Transit Union.”

  Lanza!

  Lucy felt her throat tighten.

  “It was an FBI–State Police joint operation. The team had evidence that the Local’s vice president was taking bribes from the owners of bus companies in return for guarantees of labor peace. The investigators were after bigger fish, so instead of making an arrest, they confronted the guy and managed to turn him. Because he was now being used as a confidential informant, their file referred to him by the code name ‘Source 43,’ but anyone reading earlier reports would have no trouble figuring out who he was. Jack, or someone pretending to be him, downloaded all the reports. Two days later, the informant answered his front door and someone shot him through the head in front of his wife and daughter. Twelve days after that, Jack was murdered.”

  “Jack would never have been involved!”

  “Your detective friends Trousdale and Scarlatti thought otherwise. When they applied for that warrant to search your house, they got court approval to tap your phone. They also had you followed whenever you left the house.”

  Lucy’s face flushed. “How long did that go on?”

  “A few months. They were hoping you’d lead them to a contact, or a bank account, or maybe a safe-deposit box—something confirming that you knew what Jack was up to. Then they would have pulled you in for a hardball interview. When nothing turned up, the surveillance was lifted, but it’s clear from the file that they still believed Jack had been involved with the Lanza family, and that you must have known.”

  By now, Lucy was perched at the edge of her chair and her entire body was trembling. “Even assuming Jack was corrupt—which I can’t believe!—how did the cops explain to themselves why a crooked police detective, who would obviously be highly valuable to the Mob, would be killed twelve days after he did them a big favor?”

  “Their theory was that he knew too much—that if he was caught, or suddenly got a conscience, he might lead the police straight to the Mob contact he’d passed the task force reports to. And there was another thing…”

  “What thing?”

  “There were two union informants. Neither of them knew about the other one. When the vice president was killed, the FBI took the other informant—a woman—into protective custody. She happened to be the deputy treasurer, and she’d collected enough evidence to take down most of the Local’s top officers.”

  “So the Jersey City detectives decided that Jack had been killed because he didn’t give the Lanzas both names?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then why leave a calling card? Why the bracelet? Why leave blatant evidence that they’d killed him?”

  “I know. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  Lucy launched herself off the chair and strode to the window. She stood there, grim and trembling, staring out at the gray world beyond. Olivetti waited in silence. After a moment, she turned. She looked at him bleakly.

  “Robert, will this ever end? I have a son. For his sake, I need to clear his father’s name.”

  “I understand that. I do. I can help, but, Lucy…”

  “What?”

  “I can’t change the evidence.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m grateful for your help. If it turns out that…” She heaved a sigh. She couldn’t bear to finish the thought.

  “Lucy?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Why don’t we call it a day? Would you like to go for a drink?”

  His cautious question took Lucy off guard. She tried to process the concept—the idea of, well, a date with a man. She couldn’t come up with a quick excuse to decline.

  Do it!

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow?”

  “Okay.”

  “On one condition.”

  “Being?”

  “That you meet me here tomorrow afternoon and let me read that file.” She pointed at the boxes on the floor.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are photographs,” he said, with a look of concern. “Taken at the scene … and at the post-mortem.”

  For a long second, his words hung like smoke in the air.

  “I want to see everything.”

  “All right. But it’s going to take you a few hours. How about we meet here around two?”

  * * *

  There were two thick coil-bound photograph booklets in the Jersey City investigation file. When it came to the crunch, Lucy skipped the autopsy pictures. The scene photos were hard enough to stomach. She realized that the sight of Jack’s naked body being dissected on an autopsy table might push her over the edge. She wasn’t ready to break down and impose all her sick anguish on her new friend Robert, so she set the post-mortem booklet aside.

  She speed-read the reports, pausing from time to time to ponder odd facts, but found little that pointed to Jack’s private investigation of Cal Parrish. Most of the investigation seemed focused on proving the theory the detectives had already arrived at—an approach she remembered Jack had once referred to as “the kiss of death” when it came to police investigations.

  Late in the afternoon, she discovered that a Phillips screwdriver had been found lying next to Jack’s body. That tiny fact, casually noted in an inventory of his clothing and pocket contents, focused her mind. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to return to the close-up photos taken in the garage. There it was, lying behind his left shoulder.

  Then she saw something in a later sequence of scene photos. They showed Jack’s car, parked two blocks from the parkade. The investigators had located the vehicle a few hours after his body was discovered. Most of the photos had been taken at night, but two had been taken during daylight on the following morning.

  In a photo of the rear of his car, she made out a small hole in the lens of the left taillight.

  She felt the blood drain from her face.

  She hadn’t mentioned to Robert what Jack had told her about using a screwdriver to make it easier to follow someone, and she certainly hadn’t told him that Kevin had repeated the rudiments of the same story. Now she told Robert about Jack’s original anecdote. “It looks to me,” she finished, “like someone was using Jack’s low-tech method on him.”

  “And that maybe Jack was planning to use the screwdriver on a particular vehicle in that garage.”

  “He was a cop! Why wouldn’t he use one of those electronic tracking devices you read about? It was only six years ago. They must have had them then.”

  “They’ve been around since the eighties. But I’m not sure the Bayonne PD were using them, or that they even had any. And then there’s the whole issue about whether he’d need a warrant. That’s still being fought over in the courts. If he really was running an off-the-books investigation, he probably wouldn’t want to draw his bosses’ attention to his activities.”

  “Okay, then the question is: Who was parked in that garage that night? What car was he looking for?”

  “It’s a multi-level public parkade—there’s no way to know.”

  “What about surveillance cameras?”

  “The only camera was at the exit.”

  “Didn’t the investigators review it?”

  “Yes, but nothing had been recorded after eight that night. The lens had been sprayed with foam.”

  “So his murder was carefully planned.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “What about the parking lot attendant?”

  “There was no on-site attendant. It was ticket-in, pay at a machine when you’re leaving, and ticket-out. If there
’s a problem, there was a phone number to call. Everything was done remotely. Probably by some guy in a call center in India,” he added sardonically.

  Lucy was thoughtful. “Something else I learned from that file. Remember that article about Gianotti, the Lanza soldier who escaped from prison a few weeks before Jack was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “The author of that article claimed he got his information from ‘sources within the investigation,’ who told him physical evidence found at the scene appeared to link Gianotti to Jack’s murder. But the only evidence they found was the bracelet. There was nothing in the file connecting it directly to Gianotti.”

  “Devastator ammunition.”

  “What?

  “Jack was shot with .22 devastator rounds. The slug has a sort of explosive tip that causes extra damage when it hits the body. They’re unreliable, and in Jack’s case they didn’t detonate, but Gianotti used the same kind of ammo in the hit that originally sent him to jail.”

  “I didn’t see anything about a ballistics match.”

  “That’s because there wasn’t one. Different weapons.”

  “So, the bracelet and explosive bullets—that’s all they had to connect Jack’s murder to the Lanza family.”

  “Correct.”

  Lucy was frustrated. She looked at her watch.

  “Robert…”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’m ready for that drink.”

  He grinned. “There’s this bar down at Bergen Point—it’s called The Starting Point. Old style. Blue-collar hangout. It’s pretty quiet, so it’s actually possible to have a conversation.”

  Lucy knew the place. It was less than half a mile from her house.

  She didn’t mention that.

  * * *

  Lucy was ready to admit that she found Robert Olivetti attractive. During the afternoon in his office, she’d even allowed herself a fleeting fantasy of something more—intimacy, sex, diverting pillow talk—all experiences long absent from her life. But such thoughts were quickly dismissed. The thought of taking a relationship beyond an hour or so of superficial conversation just didn’t sit well. She planned to confine herself to a single drink and let it go at that.