#4 Seeing and Believing (Mike & Riel Mysteries)

by Norah McClintock

  First U.S. edition published in 2014 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  Text copyright © 2006 by Norah McClintock.

  All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Scholastic Canada Ltd.

  All U.S. rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

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  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 11.5/15

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClintock, Norah

  Seeing and believing / by Norah McClintock.

  p. cm. — (Mike & Riel : #4)

  Originally published by Scholastic Canada, 2006.

  Summary: Vin swears he had nothing to do with the robbery, or the two people who were shot. But Sal saw Vin running from the scene. Even after Vin is arrested, Mike isn’t sure who to believe. He’s caught between his two friends—and believing one might make him lose the other

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2608–5 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2618–4 (eBook)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Foster home care—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M478414184Se 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013017569

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/13

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2618-4 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5105-6 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5104-9 (mobi)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two plainclothes cops were waiting at the house when Riel and I got back from grocery shopping on Saturday morning. They got out of their you’re-not-supposed-to-know-it’s-a-cop car as soon as Riel pulled into the driveway. One of them walked over to Riel’s side of the car. The other one circled around to my side.

  “Are you Michael McGill?” the one on my side said.

  I glanced over the roof of the car at Riel.

  “Yes, he is,” Riel said. “Why?”

  “I’m Detective Canton,” the cop on Riel’s side said. “That’s Detective Mancini.” Detective Mancini was a lot older than Detective Canton. “And you are?”

  “John Riel. I’m responsible for Mike.”

  Detective Mancini gave Riel a once-over.

  “Come here, Mike,” Riel said. I wasn’t sure why he said it, but I was glad to have a reason to go around the car and stand beside him. Cops make me nervous. Detective Mancini followed close behind me. “What’s this about?” Riel said.

  Detective Canton focused on me. “Where were you at ten o’clock last night, Mike?” he said.

  Riel gave me a “what now?” look.

  “I was here.”

  “Here where? Standing outside in the driveway? Inside the house?”

  “Inside the house,” I said.

  “He’s fifteen years old,” Riel said. “Why are you asking?”

  “Was anyone in the house with you, Mike?” Detective Canton said.

  “No,” I said. Riel had been out with Susan. My girlfriend, Rebecca, was out of town. Otherwise I would probably have been at her house.

  “Did you talk to anyone?” Detective Canton said. “Is there anyone who can confirm you were at home at ten o’clock?”

  “No,” I said. Jeez, what was going on?

  “Why are you asking?” Riel said again. He sounded irritated. He hated having to ask a question more than once. “Are you accusing Mike of something?”

  “We’re investigating a shooting at a convenience store a few blocks from here,” Detective Canton said. “The place was robbed. The man who owns the store was shot. His wife was shot and killed.”

  Riel half-nodded, which told me that he had heard about it. He kept up with what happened in the neighborhood.

  “You don’t think Mike had something to do with that, do you?” he said.

  “We’re investigating,” Detective Canton said. “We’re checking to see if anyone in the neighborhood saw or heard anything.” He shifted his eyes back to me. “What were you doing last night, Mike?”

  “I was watching TV.”

  “Yeah? What were you watching?”

  What was I watching? He said he was checking to see if anyone had seen or heard anything, so why was he asking what I’d been watching? “Just stuff. I was clicking around, you know?”

  Detective Canton gave me a look like, no, he didn’t know, and what’s more, it wasn’t his job to even begin to know stuff like that about someone like me. I wondered if he had checked me out before he came here to talk to me. If he had, I wondered what picture he had formed in his mind.

  “You didn’t go out, even for a little while?” he said.

  “No.”

  I glanced at Riel again. Detective Canton had said he was still investigating, but it sounded to me like he thought maybe I was involved. It must have sounded that way to Riel, too, because he said, “If he said he was home, he was home.” He sounded even more irritated now.

  Detective Canton didn’t even look at him. He focused on me.

  “So you were inside alone, all night, Mike. Is that right?”

  “Not all night,” I said. I was getting mad now, too. “John and Susan came home around midnight.”

  Detective Canton looked to Riel for confirmation of that fact. Riel nodded. The detective’s ice-blue eyes came back at me.

  “Mike, do you know Vincent Taglia?”

  Huh? Where had that question come from? Vin was my best friend—was as in, he used to be. I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe him now. But I had known him for most of my life, and up until last fall we had hung out together all the time. Vin and me and our friend Sal. We’d been like a team, until Vin messed everything up.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  I looked at Riel. He nodded, his way of telling me I should answer that one, no problem. He didn’t think much of Vin.

  “Last fall,” I said.

  “You haven’t seen him since then?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?” Wait a minute. Did they think Vin had something to do with the convenience store robbery?

  “You didn’t see him last night? Maybe hang out with him for a while?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen him today? Has he called you?”

  “No.”

  “Vincent’s mother described you as his best friend,” Detective Canton said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “But you’re saying you haven’t seen him in months.”

  I nodded.

  “You haven’t seen or talked to your best friend recently?”

  “He already told you he hasn’t,” Riel said.

  Detective Canton kept his eyes on me. “Vincent hasn’t been home since yesterday. His mother says that’s unusual. Do you have any idea where he might go if he needed a place to lay low? Is there someplace special the two of you used to go?”

  For sure he thought Vin was involved. Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me that.

  “We spent a lot of time at his
place,” I said. “And at my place—where I used to live, I mean, before I moved in here. Sometimes we used to hang at Sal’s place.”

  “Sal? Do you mean Salvatore San Miguel?”

  At first I was surprised by the question. Then I realized that Vin’s mother must have given them Sal’s name, too. I wondered if they’d talked to him yet.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Is there anywhere else you and Vincent hang out?”

  Hang out. Present tense. Even I noticed that. He made it sound like Vin and I were together every day, even though I had just told him I hadn’t seen Vin in months.

  “Just the regular places,” I said. “McDonald’s, a couple of restaurants near school, an arcade down on Yonge Street.”

  Detective Canton reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, which he handed to me. “If you see your friend Vincent, or if he contacts you, do yourself a favor, Mike. Call me.”

  “Do you think Vincent Taglia had something to do with the convenience store robbery?” Riel said.

  “We want to talk to him about it,” Detective Canton said.

  “Vin wouldn’t do anything like that,” I said. What I really meant was, “He’d never shoot anyone.”

  “We have a witness who saw three people run out of the store right after gunshots were fired, Mike,” Detective Canton said. “The witness identified Vincent Taglia as one of the three. We want to talk to Vincent about that.”

  “Are you sure it was Vin?” I said. “Maybe the witness got the description wrong. Maybe it was someone who looked like Vin.” I turned to Riel. “You’re always saying eyewitness evidence is unreliable. You told me that in a lot of the cases where innocent people end up in prison, it’s because an eyewitness made a mistake in identifying someone.” Riel followed all the big crime stories and trials in the news. He usually had opinions about them, too.

  “Are you a lawyer?” Detective Canton asked Riel.

  “He’s an ex-cop,” Detective Mancini said. He seemed to have only one expression: sour. “You must have heard about him. John Riel. Used to be Homicide. His partner got killed.”

  Riel gave Detective Mancini a sharp look. He handed me his car keys. “Open the trunk, Mike. Let’s get the groceries inside.”

  “We got a positive identification on Vincent Taglia,” Detective Canton said. “He was in the store. We want to talk to him. If he contacts you, Mike, call me. Okay?”

  “What about the other two people who ran out of the store?” I said.

  Detective Canton eyed me suspiciously for a moment before he said, “We don’t know about the other two yet.” He kept his eyes on me, watching for a reaction. Then he nodded to Detective Mancini and they walked back to their car.

  Where were you at ten o’clock last night, Mike?

  What did he think?

  Riel watched them go. He nodded at me to go ahead and open the trunk.

  “You were home last night, right, Mike?” he said as he reached into the trunk and started handing me plastic bags filled with groceries. But he wasn’t looking into the trunk. He was looking into my eyes.

  “Yeah, I was home,” I said. “All night. You think I would get involved in something like that?”

  “No, I don’t,” Riel said. If he had any doubts, I sure didn’t hear them in his voice. That made me feel good.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “There’s no way Vin would ever shoot anyone,” I said.

  Riel grabbed the rest of the groceries and shut the trunk. We walked across the lawn to the porch. The two detectives were still sitting in their car at the curb. I followed Riel inside. We set the groceries on the kitchen table and started putting them away.

  “You never talk about him,” Riel said.

  “What?”

  “Vin. You never talk about him.”

  I shrugged. What was there to talk about? But I thought about him sometimes, and when I did, I usually got mad. He had been in the park one night last fall. He’d kicked a kid when he was down. Afterward, he’d lied about it to take the heat off himself. Sometimes I reminded myself that he had eventually come clean, but the truth was that he’d only done that when he’d run out of other options. Still, in the end, he’d told the cops everything. So had some of the others. And when he was finally charged, it was for assault and obstructing a police investigation, not for murder like three of the guys who were involved. They dropped the second charge when Vin cooperated. He ended up with six months in custody on the assault charge and, from what I’d heard, he was going to testify at the trial when it finally happened. I guess that counted as doing the right thing.

  “You haven’t seen him at all since he’s been out?”

  I shook my head. I’d had a hard time believing he’d been involved in what happened to that kid, even though he had been. But robbery and shooting people?

  “You don’t think Vin would do anything like that, do you?” I said to Riel.

  Riel shrugged. “They said he was seen running out of the store. If the store owner identifies him as one of the robbers—”

  “If ?”I said.

  “There was a write-up in the paper this morning. Apparently the storeowner who was shot is in critical condition in the hospital. I don’t know whether the police got a statement from him or what. I couldn’t tell from the paper.”

  I thought about that as I gathered up all the empty bags and stuffed them into the bag holder under the sink. “I know I’m supposed to clean up my room,” I said. Riel insisted I do it every Saturday. “But I have to go out for a little while.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s something I need to do.”

  Riel looked closely at me. “I’m going to ask you one time, Mike, and then I’m not going to ask you again, okay? You told Canton the truth, right? You haven’t seen or talked to Vin lately?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “I just—I want to talk to Sal, that’s all.”

  He nodded. He knew that Sal had been tight with Vin and me. And, unlike how he felt about Vin, Riel liked Sal. He kept saying that Sal was a hard worker and that people who worked hard always got somewhere in life.

  “Make sure you’re home in time to eat something before you go the community center,” he said.

  I said I would. I didn’t have to start my part-time job at the center until later.

  Sal was on the register at the McDonald’s down near Coxwell. He worked there every weekend and most weeknights in addition to going to school. His father had gotten sick last fall and had lost his job. Sal said he didn’t know when or if his father was going to get better. Sal’s mother taught computer skills to new Canadians, but the nonprofit organization she worked for had lost some of its funding, so she was only there part-time now and hadn’t been able to find any other job. She’d had to sell their house a few months back, and now all three of them—Sal, his father, and his mother—were living with Sal’s aunt. Sal liked his aunt but hated the cramped quarters and the lack of privacy. He looked tired standing there at the register, taking orders. He always looked tired these days.

  I got in line. When I got to the counter, I said, “You got a break coming up any time soon?”

  “In twenty minutes,” he said.

  “I’ll take a Coke,” I said. “And I’ll wait for you, okay?”

  Sal took my money. He scooped ice into a cup and filled it with Coke. He slid it across the counter to me and said, “You want fries with that?” Then he flashed a goofy, just-kidding grin.

  Twenty minutes later he came out from behind the counter and nodded for me to follow him outside.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “The cops were just at Riel’s place. They’re looking for Vin. They asked me where I was last night.”

  Sal looked surprised. “Why’d they ask you that?”

  “They said it was about a convenience store that was robbed. Two people were shot. One of them died.”

  “I know,�
� Sal said.

  “So they talked to you, too, huh?”

  “I talked to them,” Sal said. “Mike, I’m the one who called them.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “The store that was robbed is a couple of blocks from here. I was walking by there after my shift last night and I heard this noise—it sounded like a car backfiring or something. Then these two guys came running out. They ran down an alley beside the place.”

  I stared at him. “And?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “I walked toward the store. I was curious, you know? The way those two guys took off, I thought maybe something was going on. Then, boom, out comes Vin. He was moving so fast he almost knocked me over. He ran right after the two guys.”

  I started to get a bad feeling.

  “I couldn’t figure out what it was all about. Then it hit me—the sound I heard, it wasn’t a car backfiring. It was a gun. I went into the store. It was really quiet inside.” Sal’s eyes had a strange look in them, like he was seeing what he was describing to me. “At first I thought the store was empty. There were candy bars all over the floor in front of the counter where the cash register was, and some shelves had been knocked over. There was stuff all over the floor. Then I saw a woman lying there.” He seemed to have to force himself to go on. “She’d been shot in the head, Mike. There was a lot of blood. You wouldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to be sick. Then I heard someone groan. It was a man. He was lying on the floor farther back in the store. He’d been shot, too, but in the chest, not the head. He said something about a box—he asked me where the box was. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he closed his eyes. I thought he was dead. I looked around—there was a phone behind the counter, but I didn’t want to go back there. There was so much blood. So I went outside—there’s a phone booth right there—and I called 911. The operator said I should stay there until the ambulance and the police got there. She said I shouldn’t touch anything and I should make sure no one else went inside the store.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “I couldn’t believe it either. When the cops got there, they asked me what I’d seen. So I told them.”