The Dark Path

by Kevin McManus

  Morrigan huffed and turned away, waving the guy off as he took a moment to take in some fresh air. The only problem was that every breath he drew was accompanied by the coppery scent of blood that just didn’t seem to go away.

  Edmunds smoothed his thick monobrow eyebrow with his index finger, almost like he was gently stroking a pet caterpillar.

  “Okay,” Edmunds said, stuffing his hands back in his pockets. “We question everyone who responded to the scene. Find out if anyone took the shot.” Edmunds flattened his hand and pointed it to his left. “I want everyone on this side of the block to be questioned thoroughly. That’s where our shot came from.”

  Shearer hooked his fingers into the collar of his Kevlar and pulled it down to relieve some of the constriction. “We’re done sweeping the neighborhood. We knocked on every door where the shot could’ve come from. There’s nothing.”

  “No SWAT-like Remington rifles?” Morrigan asked. “Nothing like your guys’ stuff?”

  “Fuck you, Morrigan. I know what you’re getting at.”

  Edmunds grabbed Morrigan by the elbow and pulled him aside. “Enough. Everyone get back to it. I want to clear out of here as soon as possible.”

  Morrigan leaned into Edmunds’s ear as they strolled back toward the front of the house. “I’m not lying, captain. I heard the shot. It was SWAT.”

  Edmunds checked over his shoulder to make sure Shearer was at a safe distance. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was, it was an accident.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. But there’s something else that bothers me.”

  “What?”

  “Dalton.”

  “What about him?”

  “His whole mood tonight. We questioned him in regards to the Ruiz murder and he gave us the runaround, and when we came back he started blasting.”

  A shrug from Edmunds. “Maybe he’s the guy who sold the ammo to whoever killed her, which means your hunch was right.”

  A shrug from Morrigan. “Even if I was, I knew Dalton. The guy’s not a shooter. He’s a punk. Always was. He withered like a dying flower the times we rousted him before for way smaller offenses.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t add up. Maybe he was hiding something from us.”

  They stopped just shy of the stoop, a pair of patrolmen rushing past them to help clear the intersection at the end of the street that was clogged from being shut down.

  “What does it mean then, Morrigan?” Edmunds asked, ready for Morrigan to make his point and ready to tell him to move on depending on the answer he gave.

  Morrigan turned his head and looked at the house. “He’s hiding something in there. I guarantee it.”

  “Okay. Any idea what and where that might be?”

  Morrigan knew it was better to show than just to tell, so he slipped on a pair of gloves, went into the house with Edmunds, and started searching around like they were millennials in an escape room. Dalton’s house was bustling with cops as they moved from room to room, flashes of lights from crime scene techs snapping off photos and the cacophonous grumble of several people talking at once making the whole thing feel like a stale wine party.

  “This guy,” Morrigan said, sweeping down the hall as he scanned around, “over when I was working in Queens, he used to hide his cash in his and his wife’s dirty underwear pile they had stuffed in this hamper. Really nasty. The guy played a hunch that no one would want to check there. Turns out he was right. Well, until a female officer rifled through them on his third search warrant and found it, that is.”

  “You think Dalton is hiding something in his skivvies?”

  “Maybe,” Morrigan said. “Maybe…”

  They came to Dalton’s bedroom. The whole thing gave off the essence of a city dump—clothes all over the floor, trash half-heartedly tossed in the direction of an overflowing trash can, a putrid scent comprised of sour food and sweat lingering in the air.

  “Chrissakes,” Edmunds said. “You’d think these guys would invest in a vacuum cleaner.”

  Morrigan toured the room and checked through the occasional drawer or pile, abandoning his efforts after a few seconds when he realized it was nothing more than simple refuse or toiletries. And then he came to the closet, exhaling through his nostrils and telling himself that Dalton couldn’t have been that dumb.

  But he was.

  When Morrigan opened the door to the closet he found on the top shelf a shoebox for an old pair of Nike Bruins. He took the box down, removed the lid. The content was various and illicit: a flash drive, ten grand in cash, a Beretta with the serial number filed down, and a fake passport with Jake Dalton’s picture on the inside flap.

  Morrigan held up the passport. “Captain.”

  Edmunds took the passport and looked it over. “Is it real?”

  Morrigan smirked. “No. And I know who made it for him.”

  Edmunds flipped through the pages of the passport. There were no stamps. There was not a bend or crease or stain on anything—the thing was fresh. “You sound pretty certain,” he said, handing Morrigan back the passport. “I was thinking we would have found something more substantial than just a fake passport.”

  “A guy named Denny Maisano made it. I’m one hundred percent certain.”

  “How do you know?”

  Morrigan pointed to the light creases that ran on the outside of the passport’s blue cover. “See that curved line at the bottom? It’s a little deeper than the other grooves and creases.”

  Edmunds squinted and saw exactly what Morrigan was flagging up. He nodded.

  “Maisano,” Morrigan said, moving for the door, “uses the same kind of layout on every passport he’s ever made. I was working on a case last year where we busted a couple of dealers and found a pair of fake passports on them. When we looked at the passports closer, we saw there were these identical grooves on both of them—the same mark that’s on Dalton’s passport there. We ended up finding out that this guy Maisano was the one crafting them. We just couldn’t prove it in court.”

  They left the room and handed the box off to another tech and ordered it to be bagged and processed. Morrigan told the young woman to grab him when she needed his signature on the slip before he headed outside to his car with Edmunds in tow.

  “You going to talk to Maisano?” Edmunds said.

  “Sure.”

  Edmunds stuffed his hands back in his pockets. “What are you going to do if Maisano doesn’t pan out? We need to find the guy that popped Ruiz. She clearly saw something she wasn’t supposed to at that robbery.”

  “Is this a book report, captain?” Morrigan shrugged. “Because I already know all the facts.”

  Edmunds stepped toward Morrigan’s car. “Don’t be a smart-ass, Morrigan. I’m saying that I don’t want you running around in circles. I got forensics working double time with the stuff from the Ruiz crime scene to work the science angle.”

  “They won’t find anything.”

  “Fine—you find it then. But you need to hustle. This stinks like shit.” Edmunds nodded over his shoulder. “This started as a simple robbery investigation. Now we have a dead woman and a dead perp with no one owning up to taking the shot that killed them. The more time this stays open, the more we run the risk of having a spotlight thrown on the 1-8. We don’t need that. Took long enough to get the department’s reputation back on track.”

  “This your way of saying ‘solve the case quickly,’ captain?”

  Edmunds said nothing as he slipped inside his car and twisted the key.

  9

  Rumors

  Twenty minutes later, Morrigan rolled up to the residence of one Dennis Bruno Maisano in the heart of the Bronx.

  Morrigan threw his car into park and waited. There seemed to be no movement in the house. He wanted to scope it out for a minute before he made a move.

  He took out his cell. Dialed.

  “Hackett,” the voice greeted when it picked up.

  “It’s me,” Morrigan said. “What are you up to?”

  “
Helping Bukowski with a 187. Where are you?”

  “Denny Maisano’s place. I’m checking on that passport. Are forensics done with it? I wanted to show the photo to him.”

  “Negative. They’re still working on it.”

  Morrigan clicked his teeth, debating his next move. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going in anyway.”

  “Call me.”

  “Copy.”

  He hung up the phone and stuffed it in his jacket pocket as he got out of the car, jogged up the steps to Maisano’s place and knocked twice on the door. He hoped that Maisano would answer a few questions without giving him too hard of a time.

  “NYPD,” Morrigan said, his cheek close to the door. “Denny Maisano home?”

  A crash. A shuffle. A mumbled curse. Morrigan could make out the sounds of someone, most likely Denny Maisano, hightailing it through his backyard. Morrigan had his fair share of foot chases in the past few months, so the odds, he decided, were in his favor.

  He hopped over the staircase and rounded the side of the house toward the back. As soon as Morrigan emerged into the backyard, he ducked under a clothesline and saw the blur of Maisano zipping right past him. “Hey!” Morrigan blurted out. “Stop!”

  But Maisano was hell-bent on getting away, vaulting over the fence separating his backyard from the neighbor behind. He got caught up in a fir tree, his body entangled mid-fall, but gravity pulled him down to the earth with a hard and gasp-inducing thud.

  Maisano pushed off the ground as Morrigan hopped over the fence and landed on his palms beside the fir tree. Maisano, batting at the fresh cuts on his face, weaved through the yard, rounded the right side of the house, and emerged onto the street. Morrigan kept up the chase, no more than ten feet behind him as he continued to scream, “Freeze!” “NYPD!” and “Stop!” over and over again.

  Maisano booked it left up the sidewalk, leaping over obstacles like a seasoned track runner as Morrigan huffed and puffed and pushed himself with every sinew in his legs to close the gap.

  Maisano darted a look over his right shoulder, the sight of the burly NYPD detective behind him giving him a surge of adrenaline as he crossed the street and prepared to duck through another backyard.

  Only problem was, he didn’t check the street before crossing, and a Chevy four-door clipped him going fifty on the odometer.

  Morrigan stopped dead in his tracks, throwing his hands up, his mouth opened in horror as Maisano made contact with the windshield, cracked it, rolled along the roof, and landed hard on the pavement.

  The Chevy screeched to a halt, the ass end lifting up from the hard stop as the old woman behind the wheel found herself two steps shy of a heart attack.

  Morrigan approached Maisano and saw that he was still breathing. “Don’t move,” Morrigan said, clocking all of Maisano’s (visible) injuries: a broken leg, a nasty gash on his forehead, a few welts here and there. “How you feeling, sport?” Morrigan asked.

  Maisano spat blood on the pavement. “Incredible. What the hell do you think? Now fuck off, pig.”

  Morrigan shook his head, pulled out his cell and made the call. “Sounds about right,” he said as he dialed up Hackett and called for an ambulance.

  Morrigan checked his watch as he paced the floors of the emergency room: 4:42pm. Maisano had been held up in surgery for about two-and-a-half hours. Morrigan had been pestering the nurses for the past forty-five minutes of Maisano’s stay so he could question the guy and start filling in the gaps of the investigation. A nurse, at the tail end of wiping her hands with sanitizer, tilted up her chin and made eye contact with Morrigan. “You can go in now,” she said. “But don’t stay too long. He’s resting. Fractured ribs. Concussion.”

  “How long will he be staying for?” Morrigan asked.

  “At least a few days,” she said. “Can’t say for sure. Doctor’s working on it.” She nodded over her shoulder. “He’s down the hall. Third door on the right.”

  Morrigan followed her directions and entered Maisano’s room. According to the mugshot he had on file, he was a fairly good-looking guy with chiseled Italian features and tanned skin that rivaled Al Pacino in his prime. But now, with all the peppering of bruises and cuts, coupled with the casts on his arm and leg, Maisano looked more pathetic than anything else.

  Morrigan leaned against the doorframe.

  Maisano looked away.

  “You shouldn’t have run, Denny,” Morrigan said. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions. Now I’ve got a few people searching your place to see if we find anything of value. My gut tells me that we will.”

  Maisano gave him nothing.

  Morrigan walked into the room. “Look,” he said, “you know you’re going to jail. And you know that playing ball with me will cut this down to something negligible instead of going away for a long stretch.”

  Maisano shifted his eyes and looked at Morrigan. Again, he said nothing.

  “We were watching you a year ago,” Morrigan said. “We know all about your passport business. You just got lucky that we weren’t able to get close enough to bust you. But now, today… well, we do.”

  Again, nothing from Maisano.

  “Just co-operate, Denny. This will go a hell of a lot easier for you if you do.”

  Maisano nodded.

  “Jake Dalton: you made him a fake passport. Right?”

  Another nod.

  “Rumor was,” Morrigan continued, “that Dalton was working for a few guys from Ireland. You know anything about that?”

  Maisano parted his parched and cracked lips, his eyelids closing. Part of it was the drugs and fatigue. The other part was the fact that he was ratting someone out.

  He nodded. “I made passports for Dalton and three other guys.”

  “All in the same order.”

  “Yeah. He only gave me their pictures and the aliases they wanted me to use.”

  “Where are these passports?”

  “In my house under the loose floorboard in the living room.”

  Morrigan’s eyes flared with interest.

  “These guys,” Maisano said, “they’re not fucking around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Maisano glanced around the hospital, as if he was suspicious of every nurse, doctor, and janitor that walked past his room. “They’re professionals,” he whispered to Morrigan. “Dalton had a big mouth. He was telling me all about them.” Maisano shook his head. “These guys were using him as a contact. I think…” he lowered his voice further and leaned in, “I think they’re putting together some kind of… hit squad.”

  The theory made the gears in Morrigan’s mind spin and click. He couldn’t help but think of the men in masks who stormed the pawnshop and blasted Hector Zimmerman when Maisano mentioned a “hit squad.” Between that, Mrs. Ruiz getting shot, and subsequently Dalton, everything started to feel like signs pointing to something simmering below the surface of what appeared to be a pawnshop robbery gone wrong.

  Morrigan’s suspicions were at their peak, and when he discovered what was under the loose floorboard in Maisano’s house—those suspicions began to feel a lot more like reality.

  10

  Running Scared

  Morrigan held up one of the passports that he discovered at Maisano’s place in a tight little evidence bag with the red strip across the front. Hackett, seated at his desk in the bullpen of the precinct, squinted as he took the bag from Morrigan and read the name on the inside. “Brian Rogers.”

  Morrigan pointed with a devious smile. “That’s the name that popped up when we ran the history on Hector Zimmerman, the pawnshop guy.”

  “Right. He was the guy Zimmerman filed a restraining order against a few years ago. The same one he ordered to have pulled per his request.”

  Morrigan shrugged. “A little odd,” he said, “seeing a dead man’s name on a fake passport that was fresh off the press a couple of days ago.”

  “So, what’s that mean?” Hackett asked, stroking the four-day-old stubble on his chin.<
br />
  “It means we go talk to William Thompson, the man who allegedly shot Brian Rogers dead during a home invasion a while back.”

  It took a little over an hour to drive to Long Island due to the traffic. Morrigan was behind the wheel this time as Hackett fielded the various phone calls dishing out the latest updates on the case, but because Morrigan was spearheading most of it, it was mostly trivial updates from ballistics on the bullet that killed Jake Dalton—currently in the morgue and being picked apart by the medical examiner.

  “Guess what?” Hackett said as he got off the phone.

  “Hit me,” Morrigan said.

  “We looked up Brian Rogers’ mugshot from records—it’s not the face of the guy who was on the passport.”

  “No shit, Hackett. Could’ve told you that before anyone went to the trouble of looking.”

  “Something stinks,” Hackett said as he sat back in the passenger’s seat. “A lot of people running scared when we come knocking on their door about this case.”

  Morrigan nodded. “Yeah. Someone’s running some kind of game here. We should call Edmunds and tell him to put a few bodies on Maisano’s room at the hospital.”

  “You think someone is going to come after him?”

  A shrug. “Jake Dalton took a bullet to the head when we got the drop on him. Mrs. Ruiz got popped. I think the NYPD stirred something up when we knocked on these people’s doors. And everyone we’ve talked to said that Dalton had a big mouth. I think that big mouth might have spread word to one too many people involved in whatever is going on, and now we’re neck-deep in something close to a shitstorm that I think more than a few people are adamant about keeping a lid on.”

  Morrigan’s cell rang. He tossed it over to Hackett. “John Morrigan’s phone,” Hackett answered.