Hades (17 page)

19

Billy DiPezio pulled his new Mercedes inside the wire mesh fence that surrounded the several acres of overgrown property known as Drogin’s lot. As they stepped out of the car, Justin noticed that the night sky was particularly dark. There were few stars and the moon was hidden by fast-moving clouds. He was surprised to find that it was nearly nine-thirty. The slivers of moonlight that reached the ground gave the property an ominous feel. Not just the property, Justin thought. The world.

They were met by an FBI agent who didn’t bother to introduce himself but led them toward two other agents. One of those agents was Norman Korkes, the agent whose jaw Justin had dislocated earlier that day. Agent Korkes nodded curtly at Justin but didn’t speak. It was the other agent who spoke, after Billy introduced him as having just flown in from Washington, D.C.

“It’s not a nice sight,” Special Agent Zach Fletcher said.

Justin nodded but said nothing. Then he was led over to where Wanda Chinkle’s body lay. She was unclothed and her skin was covered with severe bruises. Her chest and stomach were covered in swirls of blood, as were her right hand and her left shoulder. Justin inhaled quickly and deeply. His exhale was slow and uneven.

“You saw her earlier today,” Agent Fletcher said.

Justin nodded again. He still wasn’t quite ready or able to talk.

“What were you meeting about?”

“Do we have to have this conversation right here?” Justin finally said, looking down at Wanda’s still form.

“Unfortunately we do,” Agent Fletcher said. “At least for the moment. Look at the markings on her body.”

The unnamed agent flicked on a flashlight and fixed the beam on Wanda. Justin let his eyes focus on her now. He had never seen Wanda naked when she was alive, and it seemed particularly obscene to have her exposed this way in death. He forced himself to survey her entire body until it began to seem less a real person than an inanimate object—the same mental exercise he used every time he covered a homicide. He was able to study her with a slightly clinical eye now, and Justin saw that what, at first glance, he’d taken to be smears of blood on her breasts, stomach, and one arm were, in fact, words. The writing was difficult to make out—the letters were not very clear, the blood had dripped and coagulated and mixed with dirt, and the writing was anything but smooth—but he could finally make out what it said. And when he had, he looked up at Agent Fletcher in disbelief.

“How do you read that?” Fletcher asked.

“Who wrote this?” Justin asked.

“We think she did. Look by her hand.”

The flashlight beam moved several inches over and Justin saw a jagged piece of broken glass in the ground by Wanda’s right hand.

“There’re plenty of broken bottles and cans scattered throughout the whole lot. It looks as if, right before she died, she used that piece of glass to cut herself and do the best she could to write this message on the only canvas she had available.”

“Her own body. Using her own blood.”

Fletcher nodded. “Must have been pretty important to her.” Then he said again, “Tell me what you read.”

“It looks like ‘JW,’” Justin said. “Then it looks like the word ‘payback.’” “Payback” had been written in a combination of capital and small letters. Wanda had left out the
c
. “The next word looks like ‘Hades.’ Then ‘Ali.’” “Hades” was also spelled using a combination of capital and small letters. “Ali” was straightforward. The
A
was capitalized. The
l
was just a straight line. The
i
was also a straight line, but smaller. It tailed off from the first two letters. It looked as if it was the last thing Wanda had managed to write. Justin repeated the whole thing aloud: “JW, Payback, Hades, Ali.”

“Yup. That’s what I see, too,” Fletcher said. “You know what it means?”

Justin was still looking down at the body. He didn’t look back up at Agent Fletcher. “Maybe,” he said. “At least some of it. JW are my initials. She knew she didn’t have a lot of time, so it could just be a shortened version of my name.”

“We agree. That’s why you’re here. How about ‘payback’?”

Now Justin looked up. “It’s part of what we talked about earlier. When I met her in her car. She owed me something. At least I thought so. We talked about what the appropriate form of payback would be.”

“Payback on whose end?”

“On hers.”

“How about on yours?”

Justin shook his head in quiet disbelief. “You think I killed her? As payback? That’s what you think this means?”

“You want to convince me otherwise?”

“Can I?” Justin asked.

“What was the topic of conversation when you met with her today?”

Justin decided there was no point in holding back. There were too many things he didn’t understand about the murders of Evan Harmon and Ronald LaSalle and now of Wanda Chinkle and how they were connected. He wasn’t really worried about FBI suspicion of his involvement. That would take care of itself. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. And the only way to begin to get any answers was to speak on the level.

“I came up here at the request of my father and my sister-in-law, Victoria LaSalle,” Justin said. “I’m sure you know why.”

“Her husband’s murder. What was she expecting you to do?”

“I don’t know. Basically, find out what happened.”

“And what have you found out?”

“So far, not a thing,” Justin said. “I’ve just begun talking to people. Before Billy picked me up, I was at Ronald LaSalle’s office, talking to the people who worked for him.”

“Looking for something in particular?”

“Looking for absolutely anything that I could tie together. Just throwing a lot of shit against the wall and seeing if anything’ll stick.”

“What did Wanda tell you about the murder?”

“Nothing. In fact, she went out of her way to tell me nothing. She wanted to meet with me to tell me to stay away from the investigation.”

“Why?”

Justin sighed. “For my own good.”

Fletcher looked at him curiously.

“Look,” Justin said. “We had a complicated relationship. We were friends, but we also had our differences. Sometimes our goals were not exactly in sync.”

“You blamed her for the time you spend at Guantanamo last year.”

“I didn’t blame her,” Justin said. “I knew she’d allowed it. Possibly even manipulated things so it would happen.”

“And you didn’t like that.”

“No, I didn’t. Would you?”

“So you killed her as payback.”

“I told you. ‘Payback’ refers to our conversation today. She thought she was doing me a favor by warning me off Ronald LaSalle’s murder.” Again, Justin decided there was no point in holding back. Agent Fletcher had the look of someone well aware of what was going on around him. “And not just LaSalle. I’m involved in investigating the murder of Evan Harmon down in Long Island.”

“You’re involved in more than the investigation from what I hear.”

“Whoever you’re hearing that from doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Wanda knew the truth. She was telling me to back off that one as well.”

“Because they’re connected?”

“She wouldn’t say. But it seems like a logical conclusion.”

“And what was your response to her payback?”

“I told her it wasn’t even close.”

“Not good enough?”

“That’s right.”

“So you don’t think she was pointing the finger at you?”

“I know she wasn’t. I think she was trying to finish the job she started this afternoon.” He looked down at her body. “What she did to herself isn’t
about
me, it’s a message
for
me.”

“Hades and Ali. That’s her payback to you.”

“I think it might be, yes.”

“Then what do they mean?”

Justin shook his head. “I don’t have any fucking idea,” he said.

He spent nearly two more hours with Agent Fletcher and Billy DiPezio back at Billy’s office at the station house. First they made him go over his movements so they could verify Justin’s whereabouts every second of the day from the moment he left Wanda’s car. They examined every word that Justin could remember about his conversation with Wanda. They hammered away at the meaning of the words “Hades” and “Ali” with absolutely no luck or new insight. They went over every possible thing Justin could add to their understanding of Wanda’s murder, and Justin was as cooperative as he could possibly be. He told them everything, except for one detail. He made no mention of his meeting with Bruno Pecozzi that afternoon. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just to protect the big man, although he didn’t feel any great desire to simply throw Bruno to the wolves with no cause. The truth is, he thought there might be cause. Wanda had insinuated that Bruno was playing some kind of role in all this. Justin decided he needed to know what that role was before he gave up any more information.

Somewhere around 12:30 a.m. Fletcher finally told him he could go. As he was leaving, Billy told him that they’d speak soon. Fletcher said, “Wanda’s advice was solid.”

“About not getting involved,” Justin said.

“That’s right.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Justin said.

“But you’re not going to follow it, are you?”

“No,” Justin said, “I’m not.”

“Then I need a favor,” Agent Fletcher said.

“You want me to do the FBI a favor?”

“All right,” Fletcher said. “Let’s consider it an offer more than a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“Work with us.”

Justin tried not to let his surprise show. “I think my hearing must be bad. You want to repeat that?”

“Wanda Chinkle was by the book. She was as straight as it got. But there are things that don’t add up here. That aren’t strictly by the book.”

“Like what?”

“You met Agent Korkes. Well . . . you did more than just meet him, but let’s save that. Wanda was his superior and she told him to contact you off the record. She didn’t want the Bureau to know she was talking to you. Why was that?”

“She told me I came with a lot of baggage. That the Bureau wouldn’t be happy that she was talking to me.”

“That’s bullshit,” Fletcher said.

“It’s what she told me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I believe it’s what she said. But it’s total bullshit. You’ve had some run-ins with us, yeah, and maybe you’ve stuck it to us once or twice. But you think we actually go around thinking ‘ooohhh, big, tough, scary cop from little tiny town on Long Island, we better stay away from him’? You don’t have to answer, I’ll tell you right now: No, we don’t. You’re not on our radar.”

“So why would she say it?”

“You said she knew you well, knew how to manipulate things. I think she was jerking you around again. She tells you to stay away from something, what’s that do to you? I mean as the big, tough, scary cop that you are.”

“All right. I get your point,” Justin said. “She tells me to stay away, she knows that’s not going to work.”

“No. It means you’re going to do the opposite: jump right into the center of the action.”

“But if she wanted help, wanted me to do something, why wouldn’t she just ask? Why the secrecy and the manipulation? It’s an investigation I was already involved in.”

“I’m not sure. But if I had to guess, it’s ’cause there was something she didn’t want us to know. Her reports on this investigation were not detailed. She had sources we weren’t aware of. She was working on her own, which wasn’t what Wanda did. So I’d say there was something she was worried about internally.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know. Maybe leaks. Maybe political bullshit. We have a lot of ways we fuck up.”

Justin was starting to like Agent Fletcher. Well, no, he thought, that was an exaggeration. But he was beginning to trust him a little bit. “So what is it you want me to do?”

“Wanda was a great agent. And she thought there was something you could do that we couldn’t. I don’t have a clue what that is, but whatever it is, why don’t we work together and try to find out?”

“Work directly with you?”

“Partly. But I’m going back to D.C. We’ll assign an agent to partner with you.” When Justin hesitated, Agent Fletcher barreled on. “You asked Billy here to give you some kind of bullshit title so you could link yourself to the murder investigations. Well, I’m offering you more than that. I’ll give you FBI backing. And we’ll make it clear to anyone who gets in your way that you are working with us and have our support.”

“That does have a certain amount of appeal.”

“Yeah,” Fletcher said. “I once met Larry Silverbush. I thought it might.”

“Do I get some kind of cool badge?”

“I guess this conversation’s over,” Fletcher said. “We’ll have an agent contact you over the next couple of days. And I know it goes against your nature, but this time try to play well with others, okay?”

Agent Fletcher stuck out his hand and Justin shook it. Even Billy looked impressed by the result of the conversation.

Justin went home, found his parents waiting up. He told them what had happened to Wanda. He saw his mother go pale, saw his father’s hand go to her back to pat her, to comfort her, to support her. He saw his mother regroup quickly. Both of his parents told him to go on, so without giving them many details, he told them that he thought Wanda’s death might be connected to what had happened to Ronald. Possibly even to what had happened to Evan Harmon. He told them to say nothing to Vicky, told them, in fact, to say nothing whatsoever to anyone. He told them he was exhausted and needed to get some sleep, said they should do the same. And he told them he’d be gone by the time they woke up the next morning, that he’d be on his way back to East End Harbor.

His mother kissed him on the top of the head. His father shook his hand. They both went off to bed.

As tired as he was, Justin didn’t go right to sleep. He sat in his parents’ living room for another hour or so, drinking two large snifters of brandy and piecing together the day’s events, replaying them over and over again in his mind.

At three in the morning, he called Vicky LaSalle. As soon as she answered the phone, he knew that he’d awakened her. The thick sound of sleep was in her throat.

“Vicky, it’s Jay. I’m sorry if I woke you up.”