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“Thanks.” She pushed the button on her phone and leaned back in her chair, propping her red Jimmy Choos on the desk. “Agent Garcia. Please tell me you’ve got good news.”
“I was going to say the same thing to you,” he said.
The FBI had been working some of the people closest to Vitsin, hoping for a source willing to trade testimony about the murder for a lifelong vacation in WitSec, the program responsible for Witness Protection.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She’d been hoping for a last-minute mole, someone with firsthand information about the murder that would shore up the details caught on the mic the Feds had installed in the back room at Samara, the restaurant Vitsin used as a headquarters for his bratva business. “I thought we had a possibility with Lyonya Antonov, but I think he has bigger aspirations.”
“The Lion,” Gabriella murmured.
“You’ve heard.” Garcia sounded surprised.
“Wouldn’t be doing my job if I hadn’t,” Gabriella said.
“What about you?” he asked. “Any breakthroughs?”
“We don’t usually deal in breakthroughs,” Gabriella said. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
TV shows and movies made it seem like every case had a star witness or damning video footage, but the vast majority were built brick by brick, and the bricks were rarely exciting, even in a mob case.
The Vitsin case was more sensational than most, both because their business was a source of fascination for the public and because the D.A. (for once) had recorded evidence that Yakov Vitsin had ordered a murder. But the rest of the case was built on the legalities of the wiretap, which relied on a long history of precedent dug from the archives of cases tried over a period of decades.
“And are we going to win this one?” Garcia asked.
“Yes.” The answer came without hesitation. They had Vitsin on tape. No threat against her or Leo would change that.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Agent Garcia said. “I don’t have to tell you how many of us want to sink the Baranov bratva. I’m thinking Vitsin might sing like a canary once he realizes he’s going to spend the rest of his life behind bars if he doesn’t deal.”
Gabriella thought Garcia was being too optimistic, but she didn’t want to rain on his parade. Besides, stranger things had happened than a mobster changing his tune behind bars.
“Fingers crossed,” she said.
They exchanged a few more pleasantries and said their goodbyes. Gabriella stared at the phone for a minute, thinking about the conversation, then got up and headed for the door.
“I’ll be in the war room if anyone needs me,” she told Marcus, sitting at his desk across the hall.
“You got it.”
She made her way to the small conference room she’d been using as a prep space for the Vitsin trial.
The sun had risen over the city, casting a glow over Chicago’s architecture and flooding the normally sterile room with warm light. She ignored the view, turning instead toward the bulletin board on one wall of the room.
A lot of the younger attorneys used their devices to strategize cases, but Gabriella liked the simplicity of the bulletin board. It allowed her to step back and get the big picture, see what she was working with, shuffle the pieces if they weren’t fitting right.
She sat on the edge of the conference room table and crossed her arms over her chest as she studied the board.
It was a mass of photos and documents that included everything from witness statements to key portions of the coroner’s reports to historical data on the Baranov bratva and their leadership.
She started with the photos, scanning the pictures from the top — Viktor Baranov — down through the ranks.
The bosses in the Two Spies.
Vasily Chernoff, who was the organization’s Bookkeeper, a title that meant he collected the money from card games and prostitution rings, the bookmaking cells sprinkled throughout the city, and the resale of stolen merchandise off tractor-trailers bound for wholesalers and retailers.
And then Vitsin himself, a brigadier in the organization who ran a handful of guys, kicking up money to Chernoff who then kicked it up to Baranov himself.
There were two pictures under Vitsin’s, a fair-haired man of about thirty and a dark-haired man closer to forty.
Her gaze lingered on the dark-haired man.
