by David Hosp
Carlos walked over and sat down in the pew next to Jimmy. “I had high hopes for you. You know that?”
“Yes, Padre,” Jimmy said. He realized he was crying. “I’m sorry.”
“Very high hopes for you. You are not Salvadoran, but I thought you were strong. In some ways, I saw more of myself in you than I have in anyone else. In some ways, I thought of you as a son. I had a son once, did you know that?”
Jimmy shook his head, the tears wagging as they flowed down his cheeks.
“He’s gone now, but you reminded me of him.”
“Padre, I’m so sor—”
Carlos patted Jimmy’s knee, cutting him off. “Not to worry. We are all in God’s hands in the end.” He looked up at the stained-glass window rising up from behind the altar. The morning light was streaming through it, casting a multicolored glow over Carlos’s heavily tattooed face. The effect was kaleidoscopic, and Jimmy felt dizzy as he looked at the older man.
“Were you raised in the Church, Jimmy?”
“No. My mother was . . . She wasn’t religious. My father was American.”
Carlos nodded in understanding. “Do you know the story of Abraham?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“Abraham was God’s chosen. He was God’s favorite. He was the man God loved above all others. But God still knew Abraham needed to be tested. He needed to prove his trust and devotion to God. So God sent Abraham up into the mountains. He told him to bring his oldest son.” Carlos stood and took Jimmy by the hand, leading him up to the altar. “God had Abraham build a great altar. Then He told Abraham to have his son lie down on the altar.” Carlos gently pushed Jimmy down onto his knees. “And then God told Abraham to take his blade and kill his own son as a sign of his obedience to God.”
Carlos reached behind him and picked up a machete that was leaning against the wall. He brought it up over his head. “Abraham raised his sword, ready to kill his own flesh and blood in the name of God. God, seeing that Abraham was worthy of His trust, took mercy on him. And as Abraham began to swing his sword, the hand of God came down and stopped the blade, sparing his son.”
Jimmy was on his knees, looking up through his tears at Carlos as the light streamed in from the stained-glass window. He looked divine to Jimmy.
“So you see, Jimmy, there is really only one question for the two of us here today.”
“What?” Jimmy sobbed.
Carlos stared evenly at Jimmy. “Whether God will have mercy on us.” With that, he swung the machete in a swift, even arch toward Jimmy’s head. Jimmy saw it coming and flinched backward a half foot in an effort to avoid the blade. His reaction saved him, but not by much. The machete sank cleanly into the meat of his left arm, just below the gunshot wound. It cut through the muscle and severed the bone, and Jimmy’s arm fell onto the altar in front of him.
“No!” Jimmy screamed. He reached out with his remaining hand and grabbed his disembodied arm. All rational thought deserted him. “No!” he screamed again, and tried to make his way off the altar and toward the church door. His entire mental process was reduced to a single word: Run!
Unfortunately for him, the altar was now slick with the blood pouring from the stump below his shoulder. His balance was gone, and he slipped and went back down on his knees, dropping his severed arm and letting it slide across the floor.
Carlos stalked him from behind. He came up alongside Jimmy, stretched out at his feet. He held the machete in both hands, like a baseball bat. Jimmy looked up at him.
“Please! No!” Jimmy begged.
Carlos took a step and swung the machete in a low, strong uppercut, catching Jimmy below the rib cage, splitting open his belly. Jimmy looked down and saw ribbons of intestines spilling out of him onto the floor. The stench was awful. He tried to crawl, but the top and bottom halves of his body were no longer able to function together with any semblance of coordination, and he was able to do little more than squirm on the floor in a pool of his own innards.
Carlos looked down at him. “I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said. “God has no more mercy left.” He brought the machete up again, and Jimmy watched helplessly as the blade swung hard toward his neck. There was nothing he could do, and the blow caught him cleanly in the throat, severing his head from his shoulders.
Perhaps God had some mercy left after all; Jimmy no longer felt a thing.
Chapter Thirty-two
Outside the hospital, Finn climbed into his car and started the engine. It had taken a few moments for them to find the tiny MG, as the plows had pushed piles of snow up against the convertible in uneven clumps.
“Where to first?” Finn asked. “Talk to Macintyre? He’s got to be at the heart of this, right?”
“Probably,” Kozlowski agreed. “But he’s not going to be easy to shake; he’s been around for too long, and he knows how the game is played. He’s not going to show us his cards unless we can put a bigger pot on the table in front of him. Right now we have nothing to bet with.”
“Fornier, then? He’s a sleazy weasel. A little bit of pressure, and I bet he’ll topple over.”
“Maybe,” Kozlowski said. “But he’s our second visit. There’s someone else we need to talk to first.”
“Who?” Finn was pulling out of the parking space, craning his neck around the mountains of snow to avoid being sideswiped by oncoming traffic.
“Madeline Steele,” Kozlowski said.
“Steele? I thought you said she wouldn’t talk. You thought she’d shoot me instead.”
“She may still shoot you. But I can get her to talk.”
Finn cast a sideways glance at the private detective, who was inscrutable. “You wanna tell me what she’s going to say before we get there?”
Kozlowski shook his head. “Better that you hear it from her.”
z
Finn and Kozlowski headed to police headquarters in Roxbury to talk to Steele, but they were told that she was taking a few days off for the holidays. From there, they headed out to the South Boston neighborhood where Steele had grown up and where she still lived.
The small clapboard house where she rented an apartment was easy to spot from the street. The residences in Southie were packed tightly together and sat flush to the sidewalks, leaving little room for pedestrians. The dearth of space was even more acute in front of Steele’s house, as a long iron-railed cement ramp sidled its way up to the front door.
Kozlowski rang the doorbell, and they waited patiently on the front steps.
Two minutes later, the door swung open, and Madeline Steele looked up at them from her wheelchair. She looked far less intimidating than she had at police headquarters. She was dressed in a pink sweatshirt and leggings that showed the atrophy in her lower extremities. In this setting, she seemed to Finn more like a helpless little girl than a formidable police officer.
“What the fuck do you want?” she shot at them. So much for the helpless little girl. Finn thought he detected something underneath her demeanor, though. It felt a little like fear.
“We want to talk to you about Vincente Salazar,” Finn said.
“I told you, I’m through talking,” Steele replied, going to slam the door.
Finn stuck out his foot to keep the door from closing. It was made from heavy oak and built to withstand whatever the city could throw at it. For a moment Finn thought he’d lost his foot. He jumped back, howling in pain. “Shit! That hurt!”
“Good,” Steele said, reaching out to close the door again. “Next time keep out of the way.”
“Please,” Finn said. “We need to know what you were investigating on the night you were shot.”
“Nothing,” she said. “Stay the fuck away from me.” She pulled the door back to gain some additional momentum and then swung it at them even harder.
Kozlowski stepped into the doorway, leading with his shoulder. In spite of the force with which she had pushed the door, when it collided with Kozlowski’s body, the door took the worst of the encounter, bouncing back wit
h a heavy shake and a pained rattle. Kozlowski looked as though he hadn’t even felt it. He held her eyes with his, and the fear that Finn had sensed from Steele seemed to grow.
“Like the man said, Maddy, we’ve gotta talk to you. Turns out the fingerprints were faked; we’ve got the proof. You lied on the stand; you and I already knew that. An innocent man went to jail, and now other people are getting hurt. Bad.”
As he spoke, the fear on Steele’s face morphed into anguish. “No,” she said quietly. “He did it. I know it. They told me so, and I can see his face still.” The words came out as a whisper, with little force and no conviction. Then she dissolved into sobs.
Kozlowski let her cry for a moment. Then he pushed the door open wider, leaned down, and said softly, “It’s time for us to get clean, Maddy.”
z
Madeline Steele felt defeated. Worse than that, she felt betrayed. Worst of all, she felt responsible. “He told me Salazar was the one. He said they had the prints. He said there wasn’t any doubt.”
“Macintyre?” Kozlowski asked. “He told you they had a match on the prints?”
She nodded. “It was Mac. He was the one who was coordinating with the latent print unit. He was bagging most of the evidence.”
“What did he say, exactly?” Finn asked.
“He came to my hospital room,” she said. “In the first days—I don’t even know when, exactly—I wasn’t conscious most of the time, and when I was, I was so hopped up on the painkillers that I wasn’t really coherent. He told me they had the guy, said it was a lock on the fingerprints, but that the DA was still going to want more. He said the DA wanted eyewitness testimony. Then he pulled a booking picture of Salazar out of his coat and told me to take a good look. He told me to memorize his face. He told me to remember that this was the face of the man who had done this to me.”
“But you weren’t sure? You’re not sure now?” Finn pressed.
She looked at him, and then her gaze drifted out the window, out toward the street. “I don’t know,” she said. “For fifteen years his has been the face in my dreams. When I wake up sobbing at night, his is the face that I still see in my head.”
“But . . .” Kozlowski said. It was directed at Steele with force and purpose, and shook her.
“But I never saw the man’s face when I was attacked,” she said. It was a struggle to get the words out, and once she had done it, they lay there in the room like a dead animal, grotesque and compelling.
“But you testified—” Finn started.
She cut him off. “They told me they had the guy. They said there was no question. It all made sense—I was trying to have him deported. I couldn’t risk letting him walk, could I?”
Finn looked over at Kozlowski. “You knew.” Kozlowski nodded, and Finn’s head fell into his hands. “You knew the entire time.”
Kozlowski said nothing.
“He only knew after the trial was over,” Steele interjected. “I told him months later, and he told me I had to come forward. But what was I supposed to do at that point? Let them release the guy who had taken so much from me? Go through the trial all over again? I couldn’t.”
“It wasn’t him!” Finn yelled. “It wasn’t him, and you both let him go to jail anyway!”
“I had no way of knowing that,” Steele said defensively. But even to her, it sounded weak. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Put yourself in my shoes—that was what I told Koz back then. He threatened to tell people, but I told him that I’d just say he was lying, and he would lose every friend he ever had on the force. We were never friends again.” She felt sick. “I’m sorry, Koz.”
The radiator in the corner of the room gave a squeal, punctuating a terrible silence.
“What were you working on?” Finn asked abruptly.
She looked at Kozlowski.
“You knew that, too?” the lawyer demanded of the former cop.
“Only a little,” Kozlowski replied. “Not the details.”
Finn turned back to Steele. “Well?”
“I was working on a joint task force with the INS, rounding up illegal aliens. In the course of that work, I kept running up against a new street gang that was just making headway in the Boston area.”
“Let me guess: VDS, right?” Finn said.
She nodded. “I had never even heard of them at the time, but I kept hearing whispers that they were the ones bringing in many of the illegals from South and Central America. Word was they had a whole slave trade going.”
“Slaves?”
“Yeah, slaves. They’d offer to bring people across the border, then charge them more than they could afford. When they couldn’t pay, the gang would offer to get them work, but when the people got here, they were handed over to shady operations that didn’t pay them enough to work off their debt. They ended up literally as slaves; VDS took an up-front payment from the employers, plus an ongoing revenue stream from the interest on the debt. It was a neat little racket.”
“What happened to the investigation after you were shot?” Finn asked.
“It died. I was laid up for over seven months, and when I finally made it back into the game, the operation was shut down. They had been running it out of a bodega in Roxbury, but the place had closed up shop, and there were no leads. Plus, I was in no shape to chase them down at that point.”
“And you never put two and two together and figured out that they were the ones responsible for you being shot?”
“What was there to put together? As far as I knew, the guy who shot me was in jail, and from what I knew about him, he didn’t have any real connections to VDS. What was I supposed to think?”
The three of them sat there for several minutes, saying nothing. Then Finn stood up and walked to the door. He turned to her. “I want you to put all of this into an affidavit. We’ll pick it up later this afternoon.”
“I don’t know whether I can do that,” she replied.
“Bullshit,” Finn said. “You’ll do it.”
“I could lose my job.”
“An innocent man has been rotting in prison because of you. Your job security is the last thing I’m concerned about at this point. You’ll do it voluntarily, or I’ll see that formal charges are brought. You won’t just lose your job, you could go to jail for perjury.”
She felt like her world was collapsing, but she nodded. “I’ll do it.”
Kozlowski stood up and joined the lawyer at the front door. He looked back at her, and she found it difficult to look him in the eyes. “Looks like I fucked up, Koz. I should have listened to you.”
“We all fucked up,” Kozlowski said. “Now it’s time for all of us to set it right.”
z
Finn was already in his car with the motor running when Kozlowski squeezed himself into the passenger seat. He stepped on the gas and peeled out into the street.
“Three weeks,” Finn said, his voice slicing through the cold. “Three fucking weeks we’ve been working this case. Three weeks since Dobson first came to us—ten days since he was chopped into fucking pieces. During all that time, it never occurred to you to mention to me that you knew the guy was innocent?”
“I didn’t know he was innocent. I thought he was guilty. I just knew Maddy didn’t get a good look at him. I still thought the fingerprint evidence was solid.”
“You should have told me. We’re partners on this. More than that, I’m your boss.” Kozlowski gave Finn an ironic look. “Fine,” Finn eased back, “but we are at least partners; you can’t hold shit like this back from a partner.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I gave her my word. I can’t break my word.”
Finn sighed. “You know, these fucking rules of yours are for shit. You act like they’re all based on some black-and-white inviolable principles, but they’re not. It’s all a bunch of bullshit.”
“I do the best I can,” Kozlowski said.
“The world is gray, Koz. Y
ou gotta learn to live with that.”
“Maybe,” Kozlowski said. “Like I said, I just do the best I can.”
“Right,” Finn said. He pulled over to the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” Kozlowski asked.
“I just realized I have no fucking clue where we’re going now. Do you want to take a run at Macintyre? See what we can get out of him?”
Kozlowski shook his head. “We still don’t really have much on him. Even if he did step out of line with Steele, he’ll just claim that he thought he was doing the right thing. Unless we can tie him to the
faked prints, he’ll bob and weave, and we’ll get nothing. We need more to really rattle him.”
“Fornier?” Finn asked. “He’s the one who signed the fingerprint report.”
“Fornier,” Kozlowski confirmed. “But not yet. We’ve got to take him on outside the station house. He feels too safe there. We’ve got to make it clear to him that he’s not safe; not on this. We get him scared, and we’ll get the whole story—I can just about guarantee that.”
“Great. So how do we make sure he doesn’t feel safe?”
Kozlowski shrugged. “There’s really only one way to do that.”
“That’s what I thought,” Finn said, pulling out onto the street again. “Looks like those lines of yours are getting grayer by the second.”
Chapter Thirty-three
At eight o’clock that evening, Eddie Fornier sat on a bar stool in a pub on Columbus Avenue, just off Massachusetts. There were only two other patrons in the hole-in-the-wall tavern, and they were at the other end of the heavy, scarred wooden bar, minding their own business. The bartender was a tall, solid-looking man in his late forties who wore a crew cut, a goatee, and faded black tattoos on his forearms that Fornier recognized as of the prison variety. He was just attentive enough to keep Fornier’s glass full without being nosy. The place had the decrepit feel of hell’s waiting room, with its darkened windows, yellow lights, and torn upholstery. In short, it was exactly the type of place where Fornier felt most at home.
