“Yeah, that was the idea. Joshua was interested in culture and crime. It was a topic of a lot of the papers he wrote, and how he met Alexandra.”
I thought about that and tried to fit Parker Harrison into the mix. His mother had been Shawnee, and he’d told me that Alexandra Cantrell was fascinated by the stories he’d heard and what he knew of the culture.
“I’ll tell you something else about their boy Bertoli,” Ken said. “He’s Italian. As is, you might have heard, that Cosa Nostra thing to which brother Dominic is connected. Allegedly.”
“Merriman, you profiling bastard.”
He held his hands up. “Just making connections.”
“So you think Salvatore was imported by Dominic Sanabria, orphaned, framed for a crime, then paroled and tucked away at the sister’s house to steal back the dead father’s money?” I considered it and nodded. “Yeah, that works. Let’s call it a day.”
“I can tell you this, wise-ass—Bertoli had been arrested on two different occasions prior to the one he was finally convicted on. First was a car theft charge, second was assault. In both cases, the guys arrested with him were known associates of Dominic Sanabria.”
The smirk dried off my face. “You’re sure of that?”
“Positive. Arresting officers confirmed it for me. Said they were insignificant players—I believe he called them grunts—but that guy was an associate of Sanabria’s crew. No doubt about it.” Ken pointed at the file in my hands. “Interested now? Read on.”
I read on. Bertoli’s story was far and away the least interesting of the group. He’d beaten and then robbed the drug-pushing manager of a truck stop on I-71, who claimed Bertoli took cash, though when police apprehended him he had no cash but did have some heroin. Truck stops are among the less wise locations for crime. Lonely places along the highway that stay open all night tend to be paranoid about their security. One of the parking lot security cameras caught Bertoli, who was smart enough to wear a mask and use a stolen plate, but not smart enough to use a stolen car. He put the fake plate on his own car—a custom Impala featuring chrome rims with silver diamond cutouts, hardly the sort of thing that stands out. It took police under two hours to locate it and arrest him. Bertoli had a sidekick in the car at the time of the robbery, but it was no high-level mob player. Rather, his passenger was a kid whose name was redacted from the report because he was a juvenile. The arresting officer believed Bertoli had promised to sell the boy the heroin. He was sixteen years old.
The boy wouldn’t testify to Bertoli’s intent to sell, claiming he was just along for the ride and oblivious to the crime, which weakened the case. Although Bertoli—who was only twenty-three himself—already had three arrests, he didn’t have any convictions. He was offered a plea agreement sentence of five years, accepted, and served two and a half.
“Kind of a stiff sentence for somebody who beat up another guy just to take his drugs,” I said, “and odd that he didn’t want to take it to trial. Makes me wonder if—”
“They tried to get him to roll on somebody and he wouldn’t?” Ken said. “That he was scared of that sort of pressure, so he took the deal and did his time with his mouth shut to protect himself? Yeah, that was my idea, too—and where Sanabria figures in, maybe.”
“This piece of criminal masterwork that got him busted hardly seems like a major mob play, though. He beats the shit out of some guy and steals a small amount of heroin so he can sell it to an underage kid? Doesn’t feel like Dominic Sanabria’s work.”
“I agree, but Bertoli was associated with those guys, and it makes sense that the prosecutor and the police would have tried to lean on him, doesn’t it?”
Yes, it did—but he’d taken his jail sentence instead of talking. Then, with just a few years of time behind him for a relatively mundane crime, he somehow became the next selection of the Cantrell rehabilitation effort. An effort that promptly went awry. Bertoli spent only three weeks on the property before leaving. When I saw Ken’s note on the date he left, I looked up from the file.
“Hey,” I said, and Ken turned his eyes away from the window as I held up the first sheet on Bertoli. “Is this accurate? The release date?”
“Yes.”
I frowned and lowered the sheet. “Harrison was still there. Is that a mistake?”
“No. Harrison was the first one to stay longer than six months. I have no idea why. Maybe they thought he wasn’t ready to move on. Maybe he was their favorite felon. I really have no idea. Anyway, he did his six months, stayed on, and then they brought Bertoli in, and the two of them lived there together briefly. Then Bertoli was killed, and the Cantrells took off.”
“He was murdered?”
“Officially, no. It’s listed as an accidental death. He somehow managed to tumble off the roof of a six-story building. Oops.”
He looked at me with a grim smile, and I dropped my eyes and went back to the file and read the details. Bertoli left the Cantrells abruptly, claiming to his parole officer that he was taking a job at a restaurant in Murray Hill, Cleveland’s version of Little Italy. He never logged a day of work at the restaurant, though. A few days after he left Whisper Ridge, Salvatore Bertoli fell off the roof of an abandoned warehouse he had no reason to be in, and Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell fell off the face of the earth.
“If there’s anything related to the Cantrells that feels wrong, it’s Bertoli,” Ken said.
He was right. Bertoli felt wrong.
“So let me ask you this,” Ken said. “If you’ve got this case, who of that group interests you the most?”
“On the basis of his connection to her brother and his strange demise, Bertoli,” I said. It was as complete a lie as I’d uttered in a while—Harrison interested me most, of course, but Ken’s paperwork history pointed in a different direction.
He nodded. “So it would seem, but the detective I talked with, guy named Graham, was interested in only one person out of that group: Parker Harrison.”
I was really hoping he’d say Ruzity.
“He tell you why?” I asked, thinking again of Harrison’s letters, how they’d started just after Joshua Cantrell’s bones were found.
“Nope. Was looking for information, not giving it out. He didn’t ask any specific questions about what I’d found on the other guys, though. Just Harrison.”
“The current detective? Guy who’s working on the Pennsylvania side, where the body was found?”
“That’s right. He was entirely focused on Harrison.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d been holding off on sharing my client’s identity with Ken because it felt like the right thing to do, but how honest was it? If I didn’t trust the guy enough to tell him that, then what in the hell was I doing offering my help to him? You had to pick a side, sooner or later.
I was quiet for a long time, and Ken was watching me with a touch of confusion, as if he didn’t know what I was brooding over.
“Last night you wanted to know my client’s name,” I said.
Ken nodded.
“Parker Harrison.”
He leaned forward, eyes wide. “You’re shitting me.”
I shook my head. “He’d written me letters for a few months, asking me to look into it, explaining his history to me. I threw them all out. Then he showed up in person and seemed reasonably sane and talked me into it. He didn’t mention that Cantrell’s body had been found. Once I learned that, I quit.”
“Did he know it had been found?”
“Yes. That’s what bothered me. It was like he was playing a game.”
“You think he could have murdered Cantrell?”
“I have no idea, but now you’ve got a better idea of why I wanted to stay out of this.”
“Did you talk to any cops about him?”
“No.”
He said, “Maybe you should. This guy I talked with, Graham.”
I didn’t answer.
“You say he was writing you letters for a few
“Yeah.”
