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“Look, Dante, just come in. You can’t go back under—that part of your life is over now. Daniella needs you. She was in the house when it happened.”
Shit.
Dante refused to let his brain drag him down the dark path of what his niece might have experienced.
As if reading his mind, Hatch added, “Daniella saw the whole thing. She thinks she might be able to ID one of them when we bring them in.”
That was Hatch, always confident. They’d worked together a long time, and Hatch knew how Dante’s mind worked.
The fact that Daniella possibly could ID the sons of bitches, that was good. Simone would get justice, then. The fact that Daniella had seen low-life scum end her mother’s life was something Dante couldn’t get his head around.
“Who did it?”
Another silence before Hatch replied.
“Please, just come in so we can talk in person.”
Dante had never heard that tone in Hatch’s voice before, and it almost broke him. But he couldn’t break, he had to be strong for Dani.
“Who. Fucking. Did. It.”
He wracked his brain trying to recall what cases Simone had been working on. As a federal prosecutor, she always had more than one on her plate. Some cases were bigger and more dangerous than others.
“Campos, we think. At least, that he originated the idea.” Aldo Campos was currently behind bars waiting for his trial. Dante thought Simone had said they had a court date for September. “But we don’t know for sure. Get your ass back to Portland. Your niece needs you.”
* * *
Dante should’ve figured it out on his own that the psychopaths who’d murdered his sister would disappear into the ether. No trace, not even sightings at gas stations. They had vanished.
After breaking speeding records his sister would have been proud of, Dante had arrived at headquarters in North Portland, a run-down strip mall that had once housed a discount shoe store, a nail salon, and a passport photo business. Hatch had hurried him into his office and shut the door.
Chris Hatch was a tall, lean guy with a head of thick, black hair that was starting to go silver at his temples. The silver hadn’t been there when he’d first taken over the Portland office.
Like every other time Dante had been there, Hatch’s office appeared to have been recently ransacked. In the age of computers and cloud storage, piles of paperwork, manila files, document envelopes, and god only knew what were stashed everywhere. Dante had asked him about it once and Hatch’s response had been something likegood luck to anyone besides me who tries to find something.
“You’re going into witness protection,” Hatch repeated as if Dante hadn’t heard him the first time. Those had been Hatch’s first words when he’d met Dante at the door.
“Hell to thefuck no,” Dante said again.
Hatch sat behind his desk in a creaky chair that had seen better days. Too restless to sit, Dante stood across from him, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at his handler.
“Castone, be reasonable. Campos has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Daniella is in their crosshairs. Hewillfind out about her. Maybe he doesn’t know yet, but he will. WITSEC is the best place for both of you. When all this dies down, you’ll be able to live your real life, Maybe,maybe,have an actual relationship. Who knows, stranger things have happened.”
Dante’s lips quirked at that last bit. He’d never been the relationship type.
“Aldo Campos was the brains behind this, we’re sure of it. We’re not sure who the trigger men were. But I promise you, we will find out.”
If it had been Aldo behind his sister’s death, Campos apparently did not understand that murdering Simone Maddison did not mean the case against him would fall apart. If anything, it would drive investigators and the prosecutor who took over to seal it up even more tightly. He’d be in jail for several lifetimes, instead of just one. Dante shouldn’t be surprised by narcissistic criminals not understanding this truth, but he always was.
“Do they know she was there?”Theybeing the killers.
It was much easier for Dante to let his entire being fill with rage than it was to think about never seeing the smiling eyes of his sister again. About never having Sunday night barbecues where they ordered takeout from the local barbecue joint because neither of them had the time to cook.
Hatch eyed him with compassion. “You know as well as I do that cops can’t keep their damn mouths shut. There is no doubt in my mind that if they don’t know already, they’ll find out sooner rather than later.”
Fuck compassion. Fuck cops who chatted among themselves. And especially, fuck Aldo Campos.
This weekend was supposed to have featured takeout and possibly catching some soccer matches on TV. A year ago, he might have thought about heading to André Dear’s apartment, but the man had pulled a disappearing act last February. Dear had quit the Marshals Service and moved to some damp, moldy, flyspeck of a town on the Olympic Peninsula.
