“Guy went missing with his wife and was found last winter.”
“That’s him, yeah. We’re trying to figure out how he ended up dead and in Pennsylvania, and where the wife went.”
“We? How’d you get involved?”
It froze me for a moment, and even Ken gave me an odd look, because it shouldn’t have been that difficult a question to answer. Eventually I forced a grin and said, “Just doing what I do, Mike. Just doing what I do.”
His eyebrows knit together, as if he thought it was a bullshit answer or at least a strange one, and then he said, “Whatever. None of my business. Let’s hear the questions.”
“Seems the Cantrells were involved in an offender reentry program, had a bunch of parolees working out at their place, and Bertoli was one of them,” I said. It was a cursory version, certainly, but that’s all I wanted to give him right now. He didn’t need to know about Harrison or Graham or Dunbar. Not yet.
“He was,” Mike said, nodding his enormous head. He’d grown a beard since I’d last seen him, which added even more size. “You probably know that their vanishing act was almost simultaneous with Bertoli getting whacked.”
“You say getting whacked,” Ken said. “That’s the perspective we’ve heard from some others, too, but the cause of death was given as an accident.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, why wasn’t there an investigation, if the evidence pointed to homicide?”
“There was an investigation, friend. I ran it. As for the death ruling, you got to look at physical evidence. That’s the key. And the
“There’s an FBI agent named John Dunbar,” I said, “who knew a hell of a lot about what was going on with Bertoli. Did he approach you?”
Mike smiled. “Oh, you know Dunbar, eh?”
“Uh-huh. You have some problems with him?”
“Not exactly. He was cooperative as hell once Bertoli was dead, but more hindrance than help. He might not have realized it, but other people did.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dunbar told you what, exactly? About Bertoli?”
“That he was a potential witness against Dominic Sanabria, and Dunbar was working with Joshua Cantrell to get information out of him.”
“He mention that he was retired at the time?”
“What?”
“Yeah, Lincoln. Dunbar was retired from the Bureau when all this shit went down. Everything he told you about his plan with Bertoli and Cantrell is accurate, but it was also unofficial. The Feds had no idea what was going on, because he wasn’t working for them anymore. There was no law enforcement involvement, period. Dunbar’s idea was that he’d go to them when he had something to show. Didn’t pan out, did it?”
My disbelief turned quickly to understanding. The previous day I’d had trouble believing that the FBI could have implemented such a ludicrous plan, placing Bertoli in the home of Sanabria’s sister and using Cantrell as an informant. Now I understood—the FBI
“That makes sense,” I said. “Hell, that’s the only way it makes sense. The whole idea was insane. If they never approved it, that means—”
“He was running his own show with Cantrell,” Mike said. “Which tells you two things. One, the only official version is the one Dunbar provided, because everybody else who was involved is dead or missing, and, two, the man had a king-sized hard-on for Dominic Sanabria. I mean, he turned Sanabria into a retirement project? Pro bono prosecution? Crazy shit.”
Ken said, “So everything Dunbar did with Cantrell was completely—”
“Unsupervised,” Mike said. “Yes. When Bertoli took his header off the roof—with or without assistance—and Dunbar came forward with his story, you can imagine how elated his Feeb buddies were. Then the Cantrells bailed, and the whole thing started to smell even worse.”
“So they squashed the investigation?” I said. “Are you kidding me? To protect Dunbar?”
“I wouldn’t say that they squashed it, really. I mean, I did work the case for a while, and worked it hard. We couldn’t get anything convincing to go on. Everybody understood that Sanabria probably had the guy killed, but we couldn’t get a lead to work with. Bertoli was a piece of shit anyhow, nobody was crying over his loss, and the last thing the FBI wanted was Dunbar’s story going public. Wouldn’t have been anything criminal, but it also wouldn’t have made them look good. A rogue retiree placing informants without anybody’s knowledge, and then the informant gets killed? No, that wouldn’t have made them look good.”
“Nobody thought it was worth looking for the Cantrells?”
“We looked.”
“Not very forcefully,” Ken said. “The police told his family that they wouldn’t investigate. Told them—”
“Cantrells left of their own volition. That’s the way it looked at the time, at least. Packed a bunch of shit into storage and made arrangements for the house. There was no sign that one of them had been killed. Not until the body showed up.”
“You said you worked the Bertoli case hard,” I said.
“I did. Even if the death ruling wasn’t a homicide, we treated it like one as soon as Dunbar came forward. You have to give the guy that much credit, too—at least he showed up and told the truth when Bertoli got killed. A lot of people wouldn’t have the balls to do that. He had to know it wasn’t going to go over well with his buddies at the Bureau. Took some swallowed pride to come forward, I’m sure.”
“You never got anything that showed a connection between his death and Sanabria, though?”
“I got something, but it was weak. It wasn’t enough to build a case on.” He stopped talking as the waitress passed nearby and eyed her tray hopefully, then sighed with disappointment when she delivered the food to the table beside us.
“What did you get?” I said.
“Lasagna and—”
“Not the food, Mike. I mean on the case. What was the connection?”
“Oh, right. Well, there was a place across from the warehouse where Bertoli died that had parking lot surveillance cameras. It didn’t show the scene, but it caught cars coming and going. Problem was, the street was fairly busy. In just one hour around Bertoli’s time of death, there were sixty-two cars on the tape. I got all the plate numbers I could, ran registrations.”
This was the sort of work ethic that Mike was famous for, a determined pursuit of any angle, no matter how long the odds.
“I got one car, and one car only, that had some possibility,” he said. “A tricked-out Oldsmobile Cutlass, all sorts of custom shit on it, spinners and crap like that. The plate ran back to a Darius Neloms. Big D, as he is generally known.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“There’s a bunch of Neloms in East Cleveland, and the whole family is nothing but pushers and hustlers. Darius runs a body shop over on Eddy and St. Clair.”
“Tough neighborhood.”
“You ain’t kidding. These days, Big D’s doing well for himself. Making money putting in hydraulics and fancy rims and stereos, all the toys that the young thugs like, makes ’em feel like they’re in a rap video. There was a time, though, when he took a bust for running a chop shop. Taking in stolen cars, repainting them, adding some window tint, maybe changing the headlights or the grille, and sending ’em back out. He didn’t take a hard fall because they had trouble proving he knew the cars were stolen. I’m sure that was crap, but the guys bringing him the cars worked for Dominic Sanabria and a guy named Johnny DiPietro.”
