But it was a local cop who called her that Saturday night, a detective in what they called Area 5 back then, before they’d consolidated the areas to North, Central, and South. He’d picked up a recent immigrant from Northern Ireland named Sean Burke after the man had allegedly assaulted three people in a South Side restaurant.
“Doesn’t sound federal to me,” Greenwood had told him.
“There’s something going on with this guy,” the detective had answered. “Something major. But I can’t get any of the victims to cooperate. All three of them were taken to the hospital, but nobody’s talking.”
“Witnesses?”
“A whole restaurantful. But nobody will say a word.”
“Look, Detective, I feel for you, but I still don’t understand why you’re—”
“I found an assault rifle in his vehicle. I want to charge him with that just so I have something to hold him overnight.”
“You don’t need me to do that.”
“Yes I do. This asshole sergeant I’m working under right now, he wants me to kick him. But if I can get a federal charge …”
This was a year before Congress would let the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expire and possession of certain types of assault rifles was still a federal offense. But Greenwood was working off an especially tight set of declination guidelines that night and she knew what would happen to her if she let this detective file a federal felony charge for just one weapon in a backseat.
“Did he use this weapon in the commission of a crime?” she asked.
“Far as I can tell, it hasn’t even been fired yet. But I’ve been doing this a long time, ma’am. I’ve learned to trust my gut and my gut is screaming about this guy.”
“I hear Tagamet’s good for that.”
Greenwood heard the detective laugh on the other end of the phone. Something about that made him seem more real to her. Made him seem like what he was: a man trying to do his job.
“You know that sling your sergeant’s going to have your ass in when he finds out you went behind his back?” Greenwood asked. “I hope there’s room for mine, too. Go ahead and charge him.”
The next day, Greenwood found out what her punishment would be for approving a simple weapons possession charge in the busiest month of the year. She was given the case, solo, on top of everything else she already had on her plate. There was no time to complain about it because she knew the clock was ticking, so she called the detective at Area 5 to follow up on the disposition of the arrest.
“Burke is being released,” the detective told her in a voice that held none of the conviction of the man she’d talked to the night before. “I’m sorry for all of the trouble.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I thought you said—”
“Forget it ever happened, Counselor. It was a mistake.”
Then he hung up. She sat there at her desk, thinking about the sudden reversal and what could have caused it, until she finally got up and left her office. She didn’t have the time to spend half the day fighting traffic all the way down to the Area 5 station, but she had to see this detective face-to-face. And if possible, she wanted to see the subject, Sean Burke, before he got out.
She gave the detective’s name to the desk sergeant, was told that he had left for the day. “Taking some personal time,” the sergeant said. And that was the end of it.
Until she got back out on the sidewalk and saw a man standing there.
He was thin, with a rough, pockmarked face and disheveled red hair. Seemingly too small and too slight to put three people in hospital beds. He looked back at her, watching her watching him, with a slight smile on his face. She knew this must be Sean Burke.
A black Escalade pulled up and Burke opened the passenger’s-side door. Before he got in, he turned back to Greenwood and gave her a little nod of the head. Then he was gone.
That night, she had drinks with an FBI agent named Tim Flaherty. She’d been seeing him off and on, nothing serious, just drinks after work, until the night he stayed over, leaving early the next morning without leaving a note. So they were officially off at the moment, which was actually fine for her because she didn’t have the time to be on. But she wanted to ask him about Sean Burke.
He promised he’d look him up and get back to her.
The next day, Flaherty called her and told her he’d spent the whole morning tracking down everything he could find on Burke. “I’ve run into this other name a couple times now,” he said. “It’s like I’m touching a live wire, or something, every time I hit it.”
“What’s the name?”
“Darius Cole. You ever hear of him?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“He’s got a juvenile record from a long time ago, but then he just disappears. Right off the map. I’ll keep digging and tell you what I find tonight. At dinner. Our usual place?”
When she got to the restaurant, she waited for a half hour at the bar. Flaherty never showed. Eventually, another man in a suit walked in and found her there. He was tall, with dark eyes and a thick mustache that should have been retired with Burt Reynolds.
“You’re Greenwood?”
“Who are you?”
“Agent Flaherty sends his regrets. He won’t be able to have dinner with you tonight.”
“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“He’s been called away on an important case. He’s already gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information.”
“He wouldn’t just leave without telling me,” Greenwood said. Something about this man got to her. On the same level that Burke had.
“I’m going to give you my card,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. “You have any more questions about Sean Burke or Darius Cole, I’d appreciate it if you could bring them directly to me, okay?”
Greenwood took the card. Stanley Horton, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Below that was the address and phone number of the field office on Roosevelt.
“You have a nice night,” he said, pursing that mustache into some semblance of a smile before leaving.
As she sat at the bar and finished her drink, Rachel Greenwood kept looking at the card. And wondering.
She never did see Tim Flaherty again. The agent never came back to Chicago. And when she called the field office a week later, she was told he had left the Bureau.
That was the same day she took Agent Horton’s card, still sitting on her desk, and taped it to the whiteboard in her office. She wrote down the name Sean Burke. And, above that, she wrote Darius Cole.
Over the next sixteen months, other names would be added. Burke’s would be moved to the side, but Cole’s would remain at the center, the single sun around which an entire solar system revolved.
Greenwood spent every waking hour thinking about Darius Cole, and running prosecutorial interference for the small team of DEA agents working on the case. Wiretaps, audio and video surveillance, garbage pulls—Cole was a careful man with an uncanny ability to keep his own name off every record. Greenwood was just as careful, keeping the investigation securely under wraps, with strict orders to everyone involved to be especially careful about any possible interaction with the FBI. Even then, as the evidence was slowly gathered, it became clear that this would have to be, ultimately, a pure “cooperator” case, built almost entirely on the direct testimony of at least two, and ideally three, witnesses who could be persuaded to testify against him.
The first to turn was Ken McLaren. The second was Isaiah Wallace. One man knew Cole’s money better than anyone else, the other knew Cole himself, going all the way back to their childhoods. Sean Burke was briefly considered as the third cooperating witness, but Greenwood’s boss at the time, the U.S. Attorney who personally tried the case against Cole, was confident that the testimony of McLaren and Wallace would be more than enough. And he was right.
In the fall of 2005, Darius Cole was found guilty under the Continuin
g Criminal Enterprise Statute, otherwise known as the Kingpin Statute, for trafficking drugs on a major international scale, along with conspiracy to launder money, evade taxation, and commit murder. The original judge handed down two consecutive life sentences and the Federal Bureau of Prisons placed Cole at USP Terre Haute, where he’d remained ever since.
• • •
NOW, TWELVE YEARS LATER, as Rachel Greenwood stood in Judge Oakley’s office looking at the list of defense witnesses who would be testifying at Darius Cole’s retrial, she zeroed in on the name that had just been added:
Stan Horton, retired FBI agent.
The surprise lasted for three seconds, quickly replaced by anger. Killing witnesses was no surprise, she said to herself. But what the hell is this?
And then her anger was replaced by raw determination. They add a witness, we add a witness. She went right back downstairs to her office and got on the phone. Within ten minutes, she had located Sean Burke at Rikers Island. Within twelve, she’d learned that Burke had not only killed his cellmate at Dannemora but had recently killed five more inmates while awaiting resentencing at Rikers, with a transfer to Southport in his immediate future.
This keeps getting better, she said to herself as she looked up the number for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. But at least we have some leverage. He’s not going to walk away from six homicides, but we can offer him someplace a hell of a lot nicer than Southport.
We need to protect this guy, Greenwood thought as she waited for the phone to ring. Keep him out of General Population, move him to a Protective Custody Unit.
She was already thinking about Jay Starr’s smug face and how his expression would change when he saw her own addition to the list of witnesses.
That’s right, Counselor. Sean Burke.
Yes, he’s a killer. One killer testifying against another. And helping me make sure that Darius Cole stays locked up forever.
14
After eleven straight hours on the road, driving all night long through Appalachia and then the long straight flats of Indiana, Nick Mason crossed the Skyway Bridge and saw his hometown again, lit up in the Sunday morning light. He couldn’t help but remember when he walked out of prison after five and a half years and crossed this same bridge. On that day, he’d had no idea what his new life would look like. Now, just a few months later, he knew all too well.
Would I do it all over again?
He didn’t have an answer. Not that it mattered, anyway. There was no going back.
He was close to the Chicago State University campus, found a crowded parking lot and abandoned the silver Camry. He got on the Red Line and rode uptown, got off at the Clark/Division stop, and walked the rest of the way up Lincoln Park West to the town house. He needed a shower, a bed, and a cold Goose Island, and he didn’t care what order they came in. But when he walked through the front door and up the polished wooden stairs, Diana was waiting for him. She was dressed for work because Diana was always dressed for work. But there was something different about her, obvious to him even in his exhaustion. Something in her eyes that made him stop dead.
“We need to talk,” she said.
In eight years of marriage to Gina Sullivan Mason, that was his least favorite four-word combination.
“How about later?”
“How about now.”
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about—”
“You left your nine-year-old daughter in my restaurant,” she said. “In the middle of my lunch rush.”
“I had no choice.”
“The last time you did this to me, I had to come rescue Lauren, send her away to God-knows-where. Do you have any idea what you did to that woman? She can never come back here, Nick. Ever.”
“It was a mistake being with her. I know that.”
“If you knew it, you wouldn’t have done it!”
“Look,” Mason said, taking a beat to calm himself down, “I just drove for eleven hours straight. And if you had any idea what I had to go through down there—”
“I don’t want to know where you were,” she said, “or what you were doing.”
“You know exactly what I was doing.”
“Just shut up,” she said, turning away from him. “I said I don’t want to know.”
“It’s my job, Diana. You know what I do. We both work for the same man.”
“We don’t work for him, Nick.”
He waited for her to go on but she had run out of steam, at least for the moment. As she turned away from him, Mason could hear her breathing, could practically hear her heart beating, from six feet away.
Mason took a step closer to her, placed his hand on her shoulder. He felt her flinch on contact, but she didn’t move away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“He’s here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Darius is here. In Chicago. They moved him up here for the retrial.”
“How do you know that?”
“Somebody from the Federal Bureau of Prisons called me. Darius asked them to, I guess. But it doesn’t matter. I think I already knew. As soon as I woke up this morning.”
“Diana …” He put his other hand on her other shoulder, tried to look her in the eye, but she kept her gaze fixed on the floor.
“I can feel him here,” she said. “In this city.”
“Where are they keeping him?”
“Downtown.”
Meaning MCC, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, on Van Buren Street. Hell, he’d just passed right by it when he was on the Red Line, that strange, triangular monolith with the narrow slits in the otherwise unbroken gray walls, looking nothing like the other tall buildings that surrounded it. In 2012, two bank robbers actually made a long rope out of sheets, like in some old movie, and rappelled seventeen floors down to the street. A security camera caught them getting into a taxicab. One of the men was recaptured a week later, the other remained at large for two more weeks after that. Nobody had ever escaped from that building before they did and nobody had done it since.
But of course Darius Cole would never rappel down the side of a building. That wasn’t his style. Darius Cole was going to find a way to bend the retrial in his own favor and then walk out the front door a free man.
“You’re helping him,” Diana said as if reading his mind. “I know that’s what your assignments have been. That man who was killed downtown a few days ago … He used to work for Darius.”
“I thought you didn’t want to hear about it.”
“How many of those marshals did you kill, Nick?”
“None. Didn’t you watch the news?”
Mason felt his own anger spiking. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder, inches away from killing him, to avoid taking any more lives than he had to.
“Darius is going to walk through that door,” she said, looking down the stairs. “I always knew he would, no matter what anyone said. And you’re the one who’s going to make this happen.”
“It’s not just me doing this …”
“Twelve years I’ve been alone, Nick. That restaurant was nothing more than a place to launder Darius’s money and now it’s one of the best in the city. I did all of that myself, built my whole life around it. And now it’s all going away.”
“Diana, he’s not out yet. We have time to think about this.”
“I’ve already thought about it. I’m leaving.”
“No you’re not. Not yet.” He tightened his grip on her shoulders.
“Your daughter told me your ex-wife is taking her to Denver. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“So they’ll be gone. You already sent Lauren away. You even sent that dog away. How come I’m the one who has to stay?”
“Because you’re the one who chose this,” he said. “You made your own deal with the devil just like I did.”
“No, Nick. It’s not the same. Your deal doesn’t include sleeping in the man’s bed.”
“There’s no way out of this,” Diana said. “Not if we stay.”
“We can’t run,” he said. “You know anywhere he can’t reach out and touch us?”
“Who said anything about we?”
“You can’t do this alone,” he said, spinning her around, hands on her hips. He had never stood this close to her. Never held her. Even through her panic and his exhaustion, there was a buzz. “Diana, I’m working on this. Every day. Trying to find a way out.”
“I’ve already packed a suitcase.”
“Go unpack it. Right now.”
“Why? What do you think—”
“You have to trust me,” he said. “We’ll find a way out.”
“Why should I trust you, Nick? You’re nothing but a …”
She hesitated as if looking for the right words.
“A hired killer.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m not going to wait here,” she said. “I’ve been alone for twelve years. A prisoner in solitary. He did that to me, Nick. Darius did that to me. And now …”
She stopped, looking for the right words.
“I can’t be what he’ll want me to be. Not anymore. Not ever. By the time he gets out, I’ll be a thousand miles away.”
She bolted out of his grasp toward the door. Mason took a step sideways to block her path.
“It won’t work,” he said. “You know that.”
“Get out of the way, Nick.”
Mason held his ground. As he looked her in the eye, he remembered the first time he saw her, in his bathroom. He was in the shower and she appeared out of nowhere, holding a towel. He didn’t know then that she would become so much a part of his daily life without ever really letting him in. An intimate stranger.
On some nights, he couldn’t help wondering, as she slept alone in her own bed on the other side of the town house—
The phone rang, breaking the spell.
He stepped away to answer it, but she made no further attempt to leave.
“What is it now?” he said.
“This isn’t over yet,” Quintero said. “I’ll be there in five minutes to take you back to the airport. You’re going to New York.”
Exit Strategy Page 14
