I spotted Flint as soon as I stepped through the doors, sitting in a plastic bucket chair near the main reception desk. I was more surprised to see Agent Stein sitting next to him.
“Agent Jase, Nick,” Flint looked at each of us in turn as he stood up to greet us.
“Good evening, Director,” Jase replied politely. “And Agent Stein.”
“Heck of a time for you two to drag a guy out of bed,” Stein chuckled. “Anyway, I’m here because I found something yesterday that might be relevant to you for your investigation. I was going to let you know about it tomorrow since I knew you two were busy doing your stake-out tonight. Though I guess it technically is already tomorrow, right? Anyway, the director thought it might be important, so here I am.”
“What is it?” I asked as patiently as I could. Stein was a good buddy, but his rambling could get trying.
“Right.” He cleared his throat. “I went through that list you gave me. You were right about there being all sorts of suspicious transactions and inconsistencies in their records. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything concrete enough for us to really pin them with anything. I suppose they wouldn’t have lasted very long as the mafia if it were that easy, though, right? Anyway, there was something that stuck out as odd in particular with this one motel out by Route Sixty-six.”
“A motel?” Jase muttered.
“I had a little look into their banking records,” Stein replied vaguely. I tensed as I wondered if it was okay for him to admit to this in front of Flint. It could take weeks or even months to acquire a subpoena to look through a business’s banking records and actually receive the information. Since there was no way that Stein had done that, he was practically admitting to having hacked his way into obtaining the information. I glanced surreptitiously over at Flint, but he didn’t seem affected by the announcement. “Turns out this particular motel was having a lot of trouble paying their day-to-day bills. Utilities, property taxes, it was all in the red until about six months ago when they suddenly paid all their overdue balances.”
“That’s some pretty suspicious timing,” I scoffed. “So far, we’ve traced the murder chain back about three months. I wonder if we’ll keep finding new cases all the way back to last March.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Stein nodded. “Which is why I dug a little bit deeper. It turns out that the owner of the motel has been receiving sporadic five-thousand-dollar payments since just before their overdue accounts were cleared. There isn’t any pattern to when the payments come in, either.”
I almost wanted to laugh at how sloppy it was. It was hard to believe that someone from the Family was behind such a poor operation. Not spacing the payments out regularly was the first mistake because now they couldn’t even claim that it was from a side job. The second mistake was choosing such a glaringly conspicuous number like five-thousand, and every single time to boot. This seemed like the work of an amateur, but there was no doubt my former Family was involved after my meetings with Franco and Alessandro. There was something I was missing.
“Let’s go speak with the suspect.” I turned to look at Jase. “We might scare him into talking if we bring up the fact that we know about the motel.”
“His name is Samuel Russo,” Flint informed us. “Police ran his prints and discovered he has priors for assault and possession. He hasn’t said anything since he arrived, not even to ask for a lawyer.”
His record made sense to me. If my hunch was correct, then Russo was probably a low-level grunt like Domenico and Sergio, whose job was to carry out small, petty crimes. This way, the members in a more powerful position in the Family’s hierarchy wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty. Whoever was really in charge had probably sent Russo to kill me on his behalf.
The police station was nearly empty this time of night. Only a few officers remained overnight just in case something happened, and it was one of these officers who led us back toward the interrogation room at the rear end of the station.
She stifled a yawn as she led us down through the hall. She looked young, probably a rookie fresh out of the academy. Usually, it was the newer officers who were tasked with the unappealing night duty, and I felt a twinge of sympathy for her as I took in the dark circles under her eyes and the slight hunch in her shoulders.
“I’ll be up front,” she informed us as she unlocked the door to the interrogation room’s viewing gallery. “The door locks automatically, so at least one of you should stay on the outside so you can let the other ones out. Just push this button by the door. Call me if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” Flint replied, but the officer was already trudging away slowly. She should have stayed to observe since we were only borrowing the police station’s interrogation room, but she was obviously too tired to care about proper procedure. All the better for me, though, to have fewer witnesses around.
The viewing gallery looked into a small concrete room about half the size of the gallery. Through the two-way mirror, I could see that there was nothing inside the room aside from a plain metal table and two metal chairs. I frowned when I noticed that a camera was mounted on one corner of the room. They were standard for all police interrogation rooms, but some places were too cheap to install them or to fix broken ones. It would make it more difficult for me to get the result I wanted, but I would just have to make do.
Russo was sitting stoically at the table, staring straight ahead. His expression was completely void of emotion. Grunt or not, he was at least a decent enough
