Page 70
Story: Lies He Told Me
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SERGEANT KYLE JANOWSKI HOLDS out his hand. Special Agent Francis Blair hands him back the phone after watching the footage from the security camera. “Just like you said, Sergeant. No way to identify the shooter. No facial features, and he was wearing gloves, so no prints.”
“We’re looking for the weapon,” Kyle says.
Blair grimaces. “If that guy works for Cagnina, he wouldn’t leave the weapon behind. He wouldn’t be that sloppy. He’s already dumped it.”
“What’s your gut tell you?” Kyle asks him. “Is everything that’s been happening in Hemingway Grove — is this Cagnina’s work?”
“Gotta be.” Blair parks himself in a chair and rubs his temples. He looks exhausted, Kyle thinks. He recalls everything he read about the Cagnina case, everything he learned from Ollie Grafton, too — the attack on the detention center where Silas Renfrow and the other two witnesses were kept. And then the fallout. Fingers pointing in every direction, blame assigned, careers destroyed.
Including Blair’s, Kyle imagines. True, they salvaged the case with the tax-evasion convictions, but the FBI suffered a real black eye with that attack.
“I lost friends in that attack on the detention facility,” says Blair. “And after that, do you know how hard it was to get witnesses to cooperate in any mob case? We’d promise them safety, security, and they’d throw Michael Cagnina in our face.”
It takes Kyle back to when he was a rookie on the job, and his field training officer took a bullet during a domestic-disturbance call. He remembers sitting in the hospital, holding the hand of his partner’s wife, wondering if he should’ve done something different during that call, if he could have prevented it. The guilt, the worry, was as heavy as anything he’d ever felt in his life.
And his partner survived. Blair, he lost friends that day. Kyle can’t even imagine.
“So what now?” Kyle asks.
Blair blinks out of his trance, gestures to the evidence sitting next to him, the sealed paper sack containing David Bowers’s clothes. “One step at a time,” he says. “We know David is Silas, but we need proof before we can act. So I’ll run the DNA and confirm it.” Blair clears his throat. Sounds like he’s got a cold. “In the meantime, I think it’s best we downplay the federal involvement. Downplay, as in, I’m not here at all.”
Kyle was wondering if that would be the direction Blair headed. “So our official statement to the media? You want us to say that for now, all we know is that it appears to be a robbery gone wrong?”
“Exactly. The public would believe that. The owner of a restaurant, accosted at gunpoint as he’s closing up? Most people, their first thought would be a robbery.”
Kyle nods. “But you’re not worried about what the public thinks. You’re worried about what Michael Cagnina thinks.”
“Exactly.” Blair pushes himself out of the chair. “Silas Renfrow has been officially declared dead. The Bureau — we’re not looking for him. Nobody’s looking for him. Nobody’s been looking for him for the last decade and a half.”
“Except you,” says Kyle.
“Well — he’s crossed my mind from time to time,” Blair concedes. “Like, every single damn day of my life.”
This guy seems okay, Kyle thinks. He can’t imagine what it would feel like to have a case torture you for fifteen years.
“What’s Cagnina’s next move?” he asks Blair.
Blair runs his hand over his hair, paces around on that question. “He’s been low-key this whole time, right?”
“Definitely,” Kyle agrees. “Seems like he’s been sending messages to David with all the shit he was doing to their family.”
“Right, because he didn’t want to call attention. He wanted to be sure David was really Silas Renfrow before he made a move. He’s probably been watching him, baiting him, collecting information. Now he thinks he has his man. Thus the gunman tonight.”
“But he didn’t just shoot him in the head and leave,” Kyle notes.
“Right, that’s the weird part. So what’s his move now, Sergeant? Think like him.”
Think like Michael Cagnina? Kyle lets out a chuckle. “Special Agent —”
“Just call me Blair.”
“Okay, Blair — the most excitement we get around here are drug busts, maybe an occasional B and E. We don’t even have street gangs down here. I’m not sure I’m the guy to be reading the mind of a Chicago mobster —”
“Yeah, well, you were smart enough to come up with a pretty good theory about Silas Renfrow.”
Kyle nods. Thinks on it. “To know what Cagnina will do next, we need to know something we don’t know. Or at least I don’t know.”
“Which is?”
“What does Cagnina want?” Kyle says. “He could’ve easily shot and killed David tonight and walked away. But it didn’t look like that was the plan. So what the hell does he want?”
Blair wags his finger at him. “That’s the question, Sergeant. That’s the question.”
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