“Did you tell the public defender all of this?”
“Sure, but nobody wanted to listen to me. They wouldn’t even let me testify on the stand on my behalf. Said it would look bad to the jury. Instead, the motherfucker lawyer they gave me just sat back on his hands and let the DA tell the jury what a jerk I was, presented evidence that wasn’t true, and then I’m sentenced to die. Here I am.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “John, are you telling me no one ever contacted you about Vinnie, about who he was, and asked you to kill him or offered to pay you to kill him?”
“Fuck no. I have a daughter. Ain’t seen her in a dozen years now. Won’t ever again. I was supposed to get out. Get clean. Be a dad. I wouldn’t have killed nobody.”
I sit back, stunned at this turn of events. Could he be lying? Possibly. But my gut tells me no.
“Thank you for telling me all of this. For being straight with me.”
“You’re the asshole’s family. I guess you should know the real story. Not that it does any good now.”
“You’d be surprised. And, John, if I can prove this and get everything resolved, we’re going to work on getting you out of here and back with your daughter.”
His eyes light up for a nanosecond but then dull again. “Won’t work. Thanks for sayin’ that, but it won’t work.”
“We’ll see.” I stand and nod at him. “We’ll see about that.”
I leave the room and meet up with Matt and Middleton in the hallway.
“What do you think?” I ask Matt as I rub my hand over the back of my neck.
“I don’t think he’s lying,” Matt says slowly. “I’ve interviewed a shit-ton of suspects in my time, and the liars don’t tend to give up that much information. He looked you in the eye. And when you said you’d help him, he looked…hopeful.”
“Agreed,” Middleton says. “I’ve never seen him like that. And if he’s here because someone dirty put him here, that’ll piss me the fuck off.”
“I’m going to keep digging,” I reply. “They may have already found something else back home while I’ve been gone.”
“If you find any other reasons to believe that Danvers is innocent, you get the information to me,” Matt says. “And I’ll help get it to the people who can help him.”
“Will do.”
* * *
The flight back is uneventful and quiet, with Matt and I both lost in our thoughts. Once back at Gram’s place, I hurry in to check in with the others.
Carmine smashes a soda can in his hand after I recount the interview.
“Someone fucking set him up,” Carmine growls.
“I mean, that’s not shocking,” Nadia points out. “It happens.”
“Not like this,” Shane disagrees. “We don’t send innocent people to death row. We don’t involve civilians in organization business.”
“Sometimes, there are casualties,” Igor says, thinking it over. “But, no, it’s not something we like to do.”
“I want to know who the fuck set up that man for killing Vinnie,” Pop says, his eyes hard as steel. “Because I’m going to kill them with my own hands.”
“I might know something,” Ivie says, surprising us all. “Right before Rafe got home, I was doing some digging on the Danvers' trial. The judge was one Honorable Lawrence Santiago. He’d been a judge in Washington for only three years at the time. Relocated here from Florida.”
“Okay,” Pop says, frowning. “And?”
“Well, at first, it ended there. It’s pretty weird to only have three years’ history on a forty-something-year-old man. So, I peeled back some layers. Turns out, Lawrence P. Santiago is actually Santiago-Reyes. The brother of Phillipe Reyes. Of Miami.”
Pop’s eyes narrow. “Of the Reyes organization.”
“That’s right,” Ivie says. “He has ties to the mafia family in Miami.”
“Looks like we’re headed to Miami in the morning,” I say. “Get packed.”
Chapter 16
~Annika~
“I called ahead,” Shane says after we land in Miami. “And I just heard back from Maceo, Phillipe’s son. He said he’s at the hospital, and we can meet him there.”
Rafe and Carmine share a look.
“Why are they at the hospital?” I ask.
“Looks like we’re about to go find out,” Nadia says. “And I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
Because of traffic, it takes more than an hour to reach the hospital. When we all file out of the car, we find a dark-haired, dark-skinned man approaching with a grim look on his face. When he sees me, he does a double-take but then shakes his head and addresses Carmine.
“I have a waiting room set up for us inside,” he says by way of greeting. “I don’t want any trouble today.”
“You won’t get any trouble,” Carmine says to the other underboss. “We just have questions.”
Maceo nods and leads the six of us inside to a waiting room on the second floor, where three other men wait. When he closes the door, he turns to us.