Page 51

“If this blows up, we could all bear the heat.”
I’m glad he completely understands what’s at stake for all of us.
“This is why I need you to arrange a convenient person who can take the fall,” I say, leaning toward him. “You remember Jonathan?”
His brows furrow again but suddenly loosen up as he nods his head. “The enforcer guy.”
“Yes. How can we make him Frank Paterson’s murderer?”
Cortez’s face scrunches up, his feet tapping beneath the table in contemplation.
“That may be tricky…we have to tread carefully. I heard the other feds had a description of who the killer possibly looked like. Jonathan looks nothing likeCapoEzra.”
Cortez is right.
We have to find a man who has the right motive, the right physique, and the right links to the evidence gathered so far.
Thankfully, we’ve been able to put the warehouse incident behind us as my legal team intelligently convinced the court that everything surrounding the warehouse was staged. That was why their whistleblower found those items there at that bizarre time of night and, then, suddenly disappeared.
Besides, none of the fingerprints on any of the drugs, cash, or ammo stacks fit mine or that of Cortez. They didn’t have anything concrete to implicate us.
I turn to Cortez. “Who else can we use? Who else owes this family?” The words come out as a growl. At this point, I feel like dragging Cortez by his shirt and flinging him around until answers begin to drop from him like rain.
“What about Henshaw?” His brows lift, increasing the size of his eyes. My fingers take turns tapping incessantly on the table before me.
“Donald Henshaw. He doesn’t owe us.”
“He doesn’t need to owe us,Capo. He can just be the guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. All we need is for the evidence to align with the man we would make to take this fall.”
My lips curl up with satisfaction at what Cortez has suggested.
“So, what do you suggest we do? How do we bring Donald Henshaw into the picture?”
Cortez’s lips curl up with a deadly smile.
“The last I heard of him, he was in a bad medical condition. I don’t know what it is, butsta morendo(he’s dying). He’s already served twenty years for the homicide of his wife and two-year-old son. Frank Paterson was the son of the officer in charge of his case.”
My eyes widen with realization.
Donald Henshaw is built almost like Ezra; he’s slightly taller, but that doesn’t matter. Not only does he have the perfect motive, but he was also just freshly released from prison when Frank died.
If I ask a few of my men at the police department to make sure a witness emerges saying they saw Donald Henshaw at the crime scene, he would automatically become the prime suspect, thereby ruling out any suspicion towards Ezra.
I lean back in my chair, puffing away smoke and staring at the ceiling. This isn’t how I planned to spend my day, but it doesn’t matter.
I already know I won’t be able to do anything productive so long as Ezra’s life is at risk. I consider calling him for a moment, asking him to take his family and disappear from the surface of the earth, but I don’t want to do that just yet.
That would mean staging the death of his entire family, making it public, and moving away to the most remote parts of the world to stay without attracting attention.
Or it would involve taking up the identity of a dead person from a different continent and traveling far away to another part of the world with that identity.
If framing Henshaw works, there would be no need for any of that, meaning Ezra and his family can stay clean and retain their lives.
A sigh escapes my lips as my mind drifts back to Aria.
Situations like this are what make me scared of feeling any attachment to a woman. Such feelings become a weakness that my enemies exploit, eventually both endangering her life and weakening my position in the mafia. I don’t want a time to come when my sins return to haunt her or disrupt the perfect life she has for herself.
Smoke swirls and dissipates from my lips.