He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t give up. He would never give up.
After the shower he checked his cell phone.
He checked it every minute.
Jeff thought about what Cordelli had said about the alert and reasoned that he should tell their family and friends back home because they were going to hear, if they hadn’t already with all the police calls to Montana.
Sarah had an aunt and uncle in Billings. In Laurel, there was Sarah’s principal. Jeff also needed to tell his boss, Clay, Sarah’s friends, Alice and Val. He scrolled through their numbers.
His thoughts scattered beyond the horror he was facing, back over time, beyond the agony he’d suffered with his daughter’s death, back to the moment he’d learned his mother and father had been killed.
It was the summer he’d turned fifteen and his parents were on vacation in Canada while he stayed with his grandfather, who’d given him a summer job helping him with his towing business.
It was the weekend and they’d gone to the fair in Billings to have some fun. Jeff loved the shooting gallery and the hot dogs. He remembered how he had just bought one for himself and his grandfather when a couple of highway patrol troopers, friends of his grandfather, appeared and took his grandfather aside.
The troopers’ grave faces contrasted with the joyous air of the fair. They raised their voices over the noise and Jeff heard fragments as one of them told his grandfather, “We tried your radio in your truck…somebody told us you were here at the fair…so damned sorry…”
Their eyes turned to Jeff, and they removed their hats when they joined his grandfather to approach him. Something terrible was coming and he felt his body go numb.
“Jeff, son,” his grandpa started, the tears rolling down his face, “your mom and dad… Oh, Jesus…”
Jeff let the hot dogs fall to the grass.
At fifteen, the world he knew had ended amid the deafening rock music, the diesel roar of the Scrambler and screams from the midway.
Jeff was at a loss then, as he was now, confronting the need to tell their people in Montana what had happened to Sarah and Cole. He thought hard about calling but he couldn’t bear to hear their voices, their horror and their questions.
He wrote the same short text message to each of them:
Sarah and Cole are lost in NYC. Very worried. Police trying to find them. Tell you more when I know it. Please pray.
Jeff closed his phone, stood at his hotel window and searched the lights of Manhattan as sirens echoed in the night.
17
Nearly four miles south of where Jeff Griffin stood, Sheri Dalfini was on the brink.
At any moment this redheaded piece of work from the Bronx was going to give up something. Brewer was sure of it as he turned the laptop so she could see the arson-homicide photographs.
A little visual aid.
The two figures in the pictures were barely recognizable as human. Amid the two black masses there was a piece of shirt here, a shoe there, something that looked like a hand.
Sheri’s gasp bounced off the walls of the interview room at One Police Plaza where Brewer had been questioning her relentlessly since they’d released Griffin. Brewer was using a different strategy with her than he’d used with Griffin.
“Take a good, long look, Sheri,” Brewer said, “because if you don’t start telling me what I need to know, things are going to get real bad for you.”
Brewer showed her slide after slide.
The victims looked like charcoal mannequins. Their hair and facial features had been burned off, leaving split skin and white teeth exposed in a death grimace.
“Who are these people, Sheri?”
She shook her head.
“Where are Sarah and Cole Griffin?”
She continued shaking her head, frustrating Brewer.
“We’re talking about charges with four victims, Sheri-two dead and two missing.”
Tears began rolling down her face.
“You’re not telling me everything you know.” Brewer shoved two sticks of gum into his mouth and stared at her impassively. She was something, all right, with that explosion of red hair, the T-shirt with the pit bull and the Harley. Butterflies, flowers, dragons and angel warriors swirled along her arms. Brewer never got the tattoo craze and never would.
While Sheri sniffled at the crime scene pictures he resumed flipping through his folder on Sheri Marie Dalfini, age twenty-nine, born in Brooklyn, married to Donald Dean Dalfini, age thirty-four. Two children: Benjamin, age eight, and Saleena, age five.
Sheri’s occupation: mostly salesclerk. Donnie had been a factory worker at the Jebzite Foundry where they made sledgehammers before he was laid off about six months ago.
Sheri and Donnie were known to the police.
When she was nineteen Sheri was charged with shoplifting cosmetics. The charges were later dismissed. When she was twenty-two Sheri was charged with felony credit card fraud. She’d bought concert tickets, clothes and jewelry from someone who’d obtained them with a stolen credit card. Again, the charges were dismissed.
As for Donnie, two years ago he was charged with assault after beating up a guy outside a bar in the Bronx. Donnie claimed self-defense. The case against him was dropped.
The handgun at Sheri’s home was registered to Rosie Dalfini, Donnie’s mother. Sheri said Donnie wanted it in the house because they feared the people who stole their SUV might come after their family.
The SUV, the white 2010 GMC Terrain, was the key.
Brewer’s task force was alerted as soon as the SUV had emerged in Sarah and Cole Griffin’s abduction. And when the Brooklyn patrol unit saw it ablaze a few hours later, a second alarm sounded.
The Dalfini SUV was listed with scores of stolen vehicles suspected of being tied to the major organized- crime operation under investigation by the task force. The operation involved a mind-boggling number of local, state, federal and international law enforcement agencies. It went far beyond stolen cars, and had been designated a classified priority reaching the highest levels of government security and secrecy.
As tragic as the abductions and homicides were, they had yielded Brewer his first solid leads.
Sheri and Donnie Dalfini were critical to advancing those leads, Brewer was certain of it. Clicking his pen and chewing his gum, he reread the file. Something about this pair didn’t sit right.
Brewer saw a tiny red flag that went back almost a year.
At that time, Donnie had made an insurance claim after reporting that a large flat-screen valued at three thousand dollars was stolen from their home. He had a receipt from the New Jersey store where he’d said he’d purchased it. The store had since closed down, but while verification of the purchase was difficult, the insurance company paid out on the claim.
Not long after the payout, the New York State Insurance Frauds Bureau got an anonymous tip that Donnie had bought the TV at a garage sale in Connecticut for three hundred dollars, had staged the burglary and submitted a false claim. An investigation by Frauds Bureau investigators from General Unit was inconclusive, but Donnie Dalfini’s file was flagged.
They were watching him.
Some six months ago, at the time Donnie lost his job, he and Sheri purchased a fully loaded 2010 GMC Terrain for $34,391. The financing they got, based on Sheri’s job, meant high monthly payments, on top of all of their other bills.
