Page 55 of Remember When We
Gibbs shook his head. “No. It wasn’t that at all. It was the way you questioned us. A little at a time until you saw we weren’t a threat. I was a Navy man. We kind of do the same thing.”
“The thing is the only people who knew I was a cop hanging out here were the people who worked with me. I never disclosed I was a cop to anyone else. There were only two guys I knew of, who knew me. They both were here eight years ago, and aren’t with us anymore.” A tension then washed over his face and that got to me.
Gibbs looked to me. I’d gotten used to his habits by now. It could only mean it was my turn to talk.
“Marshall Carson. Was he one of them?” I asked.
Mark nodded. “Yes. Who are you people? You’re ex- navy,” he pointed at Gibbs then looked to Dante and me. “But you two look like the other side to me.”
“Because we are.” Dante smirked.
I cut him a sharp glance. “We’re from Chicago and that’s all you need to know. Marshall was my best friend. He was like family to me. We were told he died in a gang shoot out.”
“Didn’t he?” Mark asked, keeping his eyes glued to mine.
The guy was a former cop and he knew we weren’t law abiding citizens. I was going to have to give him something more than just our words to earn his trust. So I did, handing him the envelope with the coroner’s report first followed by the note. He read the note first.
“I think that was meant for you.” I told him.
He bit the inside of his lip. “Fuck, damn it. Damn it.” He made a fist and hit the desk. A quick scan of the front page of the coroner’s report had him looking like he was going to explode.
“I take it this means a little more to you,” Gibbs stated.
Mark set the note and the report on the table before he brought his hand up to his head shaking it.
He looked at me and then Gibbs.
“I don’t know what to say. This was my fault. It was all my fucking fault.”
“Look, blame is something we can reserve for later. I blame myself too, but it’s different.” I spoke up. “It’s different, because I was the kid who was the bad influence on the good kid who went rogue. I’m still here and he’s not. Try that for size, because if not for me he wouldn’t even have known you. if you know something, help me. Help us. It’s the least you can do if you truly blame yourself.”
The worst thing about anything like this was all the vagueness. You never knew where to start. I was grateful that we’d been able to narrow things down this much so far. Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was Gibbs. Whatever the fuck it was we just had to keep moving with the information we had.
Keep moving before anyone who wasn’t supposed to know what we were up to discovered anything.
“Look, I’ll help you.” Mark nodded. “I will absolutely help. You are right. It’s the very least I can do, but please … leave my name out of it. The person I think is responsible would do everything he could to destroy what I have. I have a wife and kid now. I can’t put them in danger, because I’m not a cop anymore. I don’t have people watching my back. I probably never did.”
“You have my word.” I told him. I could see the fear on his face. Cops weren’t like mobsters. They didn’t have the support system we did either. They sure as fuck couldn’t stand alone the way I could, me or any of the other guys. We could work as a unit or by ourselves.
He pulled in a breath and bowed his head. When he lifted his eyes back up to meet mine, he looked ready.
“Marshall was my main informant. I used to come here looking for guys who I knew could get around the underground for me. Obviously, I couldn’t do it myself. These guys though could get around and they loved money. He was the most popular, because in my stake outs I’d seen him a lot. I saw him on the street with some dealers I would never be able to catch. Fuck he was able to get into this club I’d been trying to get into for months. I was working a kidnapping case, a young girl age sixteen went missing. People thought it was a run of the mill type thing. I did too until another girl went missing, followed by another. It all matched and looked to me like these girls were being taken for something. They were never seen again. Even to this day these girls haven’t been found.” He stopped and thought for a few seconds before continuing. “I instantly suspected sex trafficking, but there was someone I had suspected was involved with a lot of serious shit for a long time. Stuff didn’t add up and evidence went missing.” He held up the coroner’s report. “Or there was something different altogether to what I knew to be true. There’s a lot of dirty cops on the force, but no one was dirtier than who they now have as captain.”
Fucking hell. I hated cops, hated the dirty ones even more. Now I was being told that the guy I was looking for was potentially a dirty police captain.
“Tell me more.”
“I saw him with the Santoras organizing stuff by the docks. That club I mentioned was there. Marshall was able to get me some intel. He saw some girls being taken into a van. They looked like they’d been drugged. The police captain was there too. This,” he held up the note. “It could only be an extension of that. I’m sure of it, because a few nights before he died he’d seen them. I was supposed to arrange with him to go together, but maybe he saw something more he wanted me to see. That’s the best I can do, that I remember.”
“The Santora you saw, who was it?”
“Back then it was Julio Santora, the older brother. Someone hired a hit on him two years ago and shot him dead in the street. But his brother Frankie was there too. I saw ricin on the coroner’s report. A couple of guys turned up dead from that stuff back then. They were injected with it just like Marshall. In my time it was how I knew mobsters were involved. It was like a thing with them to torture their victims with it, making them believe they were going to let them live. The effect of the poison in these high doses is almost instantaneous. They tell them they have an antidote, but they don’t have shit. It’s all to get info out of them, then the vic dies anyway. They’re definitely involved, but they would have been working for the captain. I’m sure of it.”
“Name, what’s his name?”
“Bailey Donovan. Captain Bailey Donovan. The man me in the back when he was my superior, because he thought I had allowed a perp to escape. It was a set-up. I didn’t fight it, because at the time my eyes were open to all the shit. I didn’t want to be a cop anymore.”
I nodded understanding completely. “This club, what was it called?”
