The Silent Hour

“Nope. Lived off her money.”

“Well, how the hell did she get so much money?”

“The late Christopher Sanabria.”

“Surely he wasn’t worth that much.”

“Was worth a lot, and when he got clipped, the family discovered he’d left the whole pile to Alexandra. It was several million at the time, and she had to wait about eight years until she turned twenty-one and the trust kicked in. By then it was worth a hell of a lot more. Christopher was well invested, it seemed.”

“She got every dime?”

“Of his financial holdings, yes. House and possessions split among the sons.”

“Nothing to the wife?”

“Wife was dead. Suicide a year before Christopher was murdered. That was the reason Alexandra was sent away. He thought she needed a female influence.”

I shook my head. “How many sons did he have?”

“Two. Dominic and Thomas. Thomas was shot and killed by a cop in Youngstown about five years after the father died. Drug bust, but just one cop went in. Odd, right? Said he was checking out a tip he didn’t have much faith in. Rumors went around that it was a setup, that the cop was paid for the hit, but nothing ever came of the investigation.”

“Alexandra was away at her boarding school for this?”

He nodded. “She left when she was twelve, came back to Ohio after getting out of college.”

“To work with the prison system.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. I was remembering the way Dominic Sanabria had spoken of his sister. Every family has their darling. She is ours.

“Do you know anything about the family relationship after she got back?” I asked. “Was there any bitterness over the money? The mob connections don’t even apply to that—father dies and leaves a few million to one kid but not the other, it would start personal problems in most families.”

“No sign of that, but I always wondered,” Ken said. “By the time she was old enough to take the trust, Dominic was a pretty big deal in Youngstown, had a lot of other things on his mind, and a decent pile of his own cash. He’s more than ten years older than her.”

I was quiet again, not entirely sold on the idea. Being jilted out of your family money in favor of another sibling was a difficult thing for a man to ignore, particularly a man like Dominic Sanabria. It wasn’t easy to imagine the guy going after his own sister, though—that notion of honor among thieves applied more to family than anything else. I wasn’t going to figure that out sitting at my desk, though, and I didn’t want to have to leave my desk on this. Instead, I waved at Ken’s briefcase.

“Well, if their parolees are the only people who saw the Cantrells regularly, what do you have on them?”

“Pretty detailed profiles. There were four of them who worked out there, and three are still alive.”

“You ever talk to them?”

“Only two.” His head was bowed while he rifled through the briefcase and pulled out a thick manila folder. “Had trouble tracking the other guy down, and then the budget ran out and I was off the case.”

He opened the folder and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. “The one I never got in touch with, and he was working with them right up until they took off, was a guy named Parker Harrison. So maybe you want to start with—”

“No,” I said. “Let’s start with the first one, okay? Work forward.”

He didn’t react other than to nod and slide the Harrison papers back into the folder.

10

__________

The four offenders who’d worked with the Cantrells at their strange home in the woods near Hinckley had all been sentenced for violent crimes. Three had been convicted of murder, another for armed robbery and assault.

The couple’s first hire was a Serb named Mark Ruzity, who’d grown up in the Slavic Village on Cleveland’s east side. It was a damn hard neighborhood. At one time Ruzity had a bright future. A blues guitarist of some renown, he’d been featured in a few newspaper and magazine articles after landing gigs with national acts. Ken had copies of those stories, glimpses of what could have been. Ruzity’s success had always been short-lived, though; his drug problems limited his career. He bottomed out in New Orleans while touring with a band called Three Sheiks to the Wind, attacking an audience member who sat in the front of the club and talked loudly during the performance. Ruzity’s luck was poor—not only did he break a good guitar on the gentleman’s back, but it turned out his victim was an off-duty cop. That incident landed him in jail for six months, and when he got out he was broke and bandless.

After returning to Cleveland, Ruzity got a job in construction and began playing again, mostly in local bars and for little money. For more than a year he held it together, until he met a leggy redhead named Valerie after a gig one night. She was beautiful, he was stoned, and by morning he was in love. There was just one problem: Valerie was a prostitute.

He didn’t remember paying her that night, though he apparently had, and when she informed him the relationship had been strictly professional, he viewed it not as a deal-breaker but as a challenge. The Montagues and the Capulets. After a day of brooding, with a few black beauties and some gin to clear his head, Ruzity determined there was only one way this mess could be sorted out: He murdered her pimp.

The beautiful romantic vision came to a fast and painful end when Valerie herself turned him in. The bad news was that he’d just been caught for murder; the good news was that he’d murdered a pimp with a record. The sentencing judge went easy, and Ruzity spent fifteen years in prison, writing songs and studying the blues. He had no living family and no close friends, and the state’s department of rehabilitation placed him in a job with Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell, who had some ideas about offender reentry that seemed worth a try.

Ruzity lived and worked with them for six months before moving back into the city, where he made a living repairing instruments at a pawnshop and teaching guitar lessons.

The second parolee who found his way to Whisper Ridge was Nimir Farah, who’d used a machete in an attempt to murder his own cousin over a suspected affair with Farah’s girlfriend. Farah had immigrated to the United States only two years earlier, fleeing a desperate situation in his home country, Sudan. He’d come to Columbus to live with a cousin who’d arrived years earlier on a student visa and was the last living member of Farah’s family, or at least the last he’d been able to keep track of as war and famine swept Sudan.

It was thanks only to an exceptional emergency room surgeon that the cousin survived, a point made emphatically clear by the prosecuting attorney in the trial transcript Ken had photocopied. The charge was attempted murder, and the sentence was twenty years in prison. Farah served ten, then managed to avoid a criminal deportation hearing when Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell stepped in. Ken had tracked down a letter from the couple arguing quite eloquently against deporting Farah to a dangerous country where he no longer had ties. Instead, he was given parole and a job at Whisper Ridge. He worked for the Cantrells for six months, then moved to Cleveland, where he finished the degree in environmental sciences he’d started while in prison. As of Ken’s last check, he was employed by a nonprofit that specialized in water sanitation issues—particularly the challenges faced in arid areas much like Farah’s homeland.

It seemed to be, once again, a striking success for the Cantrells.

I turned the last page of the Farah file over and found myself staring at a picture of Parker Harrison.

He’d been the third hire, and though I didn’t need to refresh myself on his background, I read through Ken’s notes anyhow. I wasn’t ready to disclose my knowledge of Harrison yet, and skipping over him would be a clear tip of my hand. So I pored over the old information, found nothing new, and then moved to the fourth and final hire, a man named Salvatore Bertoli, who’d been raised in an orphanage after his mother died following their immigration from Italy.

“A lot of different ethnicities passed through,” I said. “There a reason?”