Flashback

Nick was looking at more than two hundred pages of grand jury paperwork. The secret grand jury had been seated by then district attorney Manuel Ortega in late February of the year Dara had died—seated less than a full month after her death—and the thrust of the investigation seemed to be that ADA Harvey Cohen and his assistant Dara Fox Bottom, while working on a DA department project that was still classified, had begun a clandestine love affair.

That DPD Detective First Grade Nick Bottom had learned about the affair and arranged to have his wife and her lover killed.

Nick sat back, his mouth open. He felt like screaming or moaning but knew that neither would help. Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln was watching him very carefully.

“K.T… For more than five years l’ve tried to convince myself that Dara and Harvey died in a car accident. The facts stay the same. The old couple braked suddenly in front of them… the driver of the eighteen-wheeler behind them tried to stop, couldn’t… the driver died in the fire. And nobody knew anybody else, nobody was connected to anybody. That’s what all the reports said, remember?”

K.T. tapped the photo of the truck driver, her short fingernail making a sharp, ugly sound. “Do you recognize him, Nick?”

“Yeah, of course. Phillip James Johnson. I looked into it myself. He’d been a trucker for twelve years, no serious accidents, no safety violations. He just couldn’t…”

“The name and most of his paperwork history were bullshit,” said K.T. She slid another photo out of the heap. “Phillip Johnson was actually this man. Recognize him?”

It took the better part of a minute for Nick to do so. Even then he couldn’t believe it was the same man as the truck driver. He set the photos next to each other. The second photo was of a man sixty or seventy pounds lighter than Phillip James Johnson—different facial structure, even allowing for the fat, different nose, different chin, different hair color… hell, even the eye color was different.

“The DNA showed conclusively that Phillip James Johnson was actually your old CI, Ricardo ‘Swak’ Moretti.”

Nick kept looking. He’d used Moretti as a confidential informant when he’d still been a patrolman and a few times after he made detective. The petty crook’s nickname of Swak came from his involvement in insurance scams—especially highway and street swoop-and-squats where the mob enlisted the “victims” just as they did for slip-and-fall claims. Moretti had never become a made man, just the kind of scumbag always found bottom-feeding near the real mob, always running errands for punks and hit men, always dreaming of a real score. But as a confidential informant, Moretti had been unreliable in most instances—not even worth keeping on a small dole that came out of the patrolman’s or detective’s own pocket. Nick hadn’t talked to Swak Moretti in ten years. Longer.

He studied the photos again. Yes… it was possible. Something similar about the eye sockets and teeth—they hadn’t fixed the teeth—but…

“This guy’s undergone major plastic surgery,” Nick said aloud, rubbing his cheeks and hearing the stubble scrape. “Why? The mob would never pay for such a thing. Swak Moretti was a nobody. And if you’re paying a fortune in old bucks for cosmetic surgery, why make yourself fatter, with an uglier nose and bigger, dumber-looking ears? It doesn’t make sense. Plus, I read the original DNA identification, K.T. It showed the dead driver was Phillip James Johnson.”

“All good cover story,” said K.T. “Including the plastic surgery. Somebody was setting your old pal Swak up as a hit man, weren’t they?”

“It doesn’t make any…,” began Nick.

K.T. slid another stack of photocopies toward him. “We have phone records of you calling Moretti four times—twice in November of the year Keigo was killed, once in late December, a final time three days before the… accident… that killed Dara and Harvey.”

Nick’s head snapped back. “It didn’t happen. I never phoned him.”

K.T. touched the photo of the old couple who died when their Buick gelding had been struck first by Dara and Harvey’s car, then by the truck that had burst into flames. “Javier and Dulcinea Gutiérrez,” she said. “Their names were real. Only their citizenship status on their NICCs and local background histories were fake. They were brought in from Ciudad Juárez three weeks before the so-called accident. We have Swak Moretti’s phone records arranging that as well.”

“I never phoned Moretti,” repeated Nick.

K.T. gave him the same look that he’d given to so many cornered and lying-through-their-teeth perps.

“Look, Nick,” she said softly. “You’re the one, just this week, who begged me to look into this stuff. I said it was an accident. I said ‘Who volunteers for a swoop-and-squat where you’re going to die?’ You said… You owe me this favor, K.T. Look into it. So I did. Here it is.”