Chapter Three

The first shot had shattered the glass window of the office. The noise was jarring, deafening. The second bullet splintered the edge of the pallet just behind Blayne and sent a spray of wood skittering across the polished floor. Panic gripped her and her next step faltered badly. Jesus God. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. She started to fall, but caught herself just as the third bullet roared by right where her head would have been had she stayed on course. When the bullet buried itself in a pallet four feet away, an explosion of white powder dusted Blayne as she regained her footing and stumbled by.

Her blood buzzed loud in her ears and her heart pounded against the walls of her chest, but she became aware that the running footsteps she could hear behind her were retreating, not advancing. The realization wasn’t enough to make her slow her steps, however. She didn’t dare believe that she was truly out of danger.

She was nearly to the connecting door when it burst open with a crash and a massive brute of a man in a dark blue suit came rushing in, gun drawn. As soon as he spotted her, he pointed the gun at her head. She stopped in her tracks, light-headed with adrenalin and certain her death was at hand. No wonder they weren’t chasing me. They knew he would get me. The man quickly scanned the area around them.

It seemed to take forever for him to say the words that allowed her to breathe again. “FBI! Face down, on the ground!”

“Yes, okay.” Relief poured through her as she dropped to her knees. “Two men are in here and they have guns,” she volunteered in a low voice as she got down on the ground. “They…they killed a man in the office.”

“That’s enough. Quiet now,” Dombrowski said. “Hands behind your back.”

She did as he ordered. The concrete was cold against her cheek as she lay flat and put her hands behind her back. When he started to put handcuffs on her, Blayne’s mind and gut recoiled at the prospect of being restrained. She was the victim here.

“Hey! I saw it,” she informed him. “They tried to kill me. I wasn’t in on it.”

“Quiet,” Dombrowski repeated, in a voice that demanded compliance. “Don’t move.” He fastened the cuffs and then headed toward the office, gun at the ready.

Craning, Blayne saw the boss and his bodyguard nearly run headlong into another Italian who’d come running at the sound of shots. The three of them burst through the door to the parking lot and came to a dead halt.

Almost immediately, Blayne heard someone shout, “FBI. Drop your weapons.” And from the silence that ensued she guessed the murderer and the man giving the orders had been arrested.

As her adrenalin rush faded, she started to feel the cold permeate her body from the concrete beneath her, and took deep breaths, trying to clear her head and settle her nerves.

It took a couple of minutes for her monstrous captor to return. “We got them,” he volunteered. He helped Blayne to her feet but kept the handcuffs on her.

The connecting door to the agency opened and Joyce and Claudia came in, followed by another FBI agent with a walrus moustache like something from a wild west photo. Both women looked anxious and worried, but Claudia’s face visibly relaxed when she spotted Blayne. Joyce, however, looked beyond Blayne, toward the blood splattered office, her anxiety palpable.

The agent with the moustache said, “I’m Special Agent Leslie Topping and my colleague is Special Agent Dombrowski. We are going to need statements from all of you.”

“What the hell…” Claudia stared at the handcuffs clamping Blayne’s wrists. “What is this!”

“Claud!” Blayne began. “There was…”

Agent Topping cut them both off. “No talking.” He took Claudia by the elbow and led her away toward the office, along with Joyce.

Blayne started to follow, but Agent Dombrowski held her back. “We don’t want anyone talking to each other just yet.” He let the others get well ahead before following with Blayne.

Joyce let out a wail of anguish when she spotted the dead man slumped over his desk, through the glass shards that remained of the office window. As it became obvious that half of his head was gone, she gagged.

“Who was this man to you?” Agent Topping kept one hand firmly around Joyce’s elbow to prevent her from going into the office.

Joyce sobbed uncontrollably, near hysterics, paying no regard to the agent at all. Her thickly-applied mascara and eyeliner left ugly tracks down her cheeks, but she was, for the first time in the years Blayne had known her, totally unmindful of her appearance. “Oh God, Aldo,” she wailed, eyes fixed on the widening pool of blood around him. “What the hell did you do?”

Dombrowski steered Blayne away from the others, putting a row of pallets between them as he hustled her past and toward the door at the rear. It did not escape her notice that although she was handcuffed, the agent was treating her with kid gloves, his grip on her arm surprisingly tender, like a father walking his daughter down the aisle.

They were nearly to the door when she began to hear sirens, lots of sirens, still distant. Dombrowski pushed open the steel door and let Blayne precede him through it.

She was startled to see him just outside. The tall Italian boss turned at the sound of the door, and a sadistic smile spread across his face as he looked Blayne in the eyes. He was in handcuffs and another agent was standing close by talking to someone on his cell phone, but Blayne still felt incredibly threatened. She leaned thankfully into the solid wall of Agent Dombrowski as he walked her past the cold-blooded killer.

Just as they drew level, the mobster said so quietly that she barely heard it, “Blayne Keller, right?”

The menace on his face sent a chill through Blayne. She knew that look. It was exactly the look she’d seen a moment before he killed the man in the office. It conveyed an unmistakable a message. You are going to die.

More than four hours later, the shock and fear generated by the day’s events began to give way to annoyance and frustration as Blayne repeated for at least the twentieth time every detail she could recall of what she had witnessed. She was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She had cooperated fully, answered all of their questions more than once, and was anxious to get out of the police interview room and go home.

The feds had kept the witnesses and wiseguys apart for the few minutes it took for the cavalry to arrive. Several squad cars, crime scene techs and the medical examiner van all converged on the soda warehouse within a half-hour of the shooting. After a short and slightly heated exchange between the feds and local cops, Blayne had been loaded into one squad car, Claudia and Joyce into another, and the mobsters into two more. They were all driven to the First Division Headquarters of the Chicago P.D. on South Michigan Avenue.

There Blayne was patted down by a female police officer and placed in a windowless room on a miserably uncomfortable wooden chair. Two police detectives came in, though one did all the talking, and she began to repeat her story over several cups of some of the worst coffee she had ever had.

At long last the detectives announced they were done questioning her for the moment, but before she could relax, they were replaced by Agents Topping and Dombrowski, who asked her to start all over again.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she complained, letting her irritation show. “I’ve done nothing but go over and over this for hours. Look, I’m doing my bit. I’m being the good citizen, but this is getting ridiculous.”

“The C.P.D. has jurisdiction over the homicide,” Dombrowski explained. “We’re handling other aspects of the case. We need you to go through it all again.”

And so she did, and she found that in the repeated telling of the details of the murder, she became, each time, a bit more inured to the horrific event. She even began to let go of some of the trepidation she had been feeling since the man involved had said her name. He was in custody, after all, she kept telling herself.

But once the agents were satisfied with her account of the murder, they began questioning her about other matters entirely, things the Chicago cops had not. It was only then that she began to get a clear picture of what had really had transpired that day, and how much danger she was now in.

First they asked her about what she knew of the soda warehouse, its employees and customers, and about Joyce’s involvement with the dead man. Then they asked her whether she had ever noticed anything unusual or strange about Aldo Martinelli or the people who worked for him, and she told them that he had referred a lot of men to the agency for travel arrangements.

“There is one guy,” Blayne volunteered, “who comes in every couple of weeks to pick up tickets he orders online. What’s odd is that although the destination is always the same—Miami—the tickets are never in the same name twice. And he always pays in cash.”

The two agents glanced at each other and Blayne had a strange sense of foreboding at the pleased look that passed between them.

“We’re going to show you some pictures,” Topping said. “Have you pick out anyone who looks familiar. You know, someone who may have come in to the agency, or perhaps somebody you saw in the parking lot.”

“First let’s get you something to eat,” Dombrowski offered. “And we’ll try to find a place to continue this where you’ll be more comfortable.”

Blayne’s heart sank at the news, for it sounded as though she might be tied up here for several more hours of questioning. But at least it was the first time since she’d been brought in that anyone seemed concerned about how she was faring through all of this. “A double cheeseburger and fries,” she called out as Dombrowski headed for the door. “And a large coffee. That stuff you’ve got here is undrinkable.”

They got her what she ordered and they found an unused conference room where she could relax on a couch while she looked over the thick books of photographs. During the next two hours, she picked out the Miami ticket client and a handful of other men Aldo had referred to the Balmy Breezes.

The next book they gave her had a photo of the man who’d ordered his bodyguard to shoot Joyce’s boyfriend. It was not a mug shot, like most of the others, but a slightly grainy photo that had been taken with a telephoto lens. In it, he was dressed very much like he’d been dressed today, in a tailored suit and expensive overcoat.

“That’s him.” She didn’t touch the photo itself. “The man from today. The one who seemed to be in control of what was going on.” This was greeted with a long pause. “Who is he? And how did he know who I am?”

She’d asked these questions several times already, of the cops and the agents both, always getting the same response—that she was there to answer questions, not ask them.

But this time, the agents exchanged a look of tacit agreement and Dombrowski said, “His name is Vittorio Cinzano. He is a big man in organized crime here. An underboss.”

“Organized crime? You mean the mafia?” Blayne felt so clammy she knew she’d gone white at the news.

Oh shit. She knew next to nothing about the mafia, only what she had picked up from T.V. shows like The Sopranos and films like The Godfather, and the occasional news report. But it was enough to know that she was in a very serious situation here if Cinzano knew her identity, even if he was in custody.

“He probably knows you because he owns the building you work out of,” Topping said. “Not on paper, of course. Nothing traceable, because they run a cocaine business out of there. Or did.”

Blayne’s forehead furrowed in confusion. “That can’t be right. Philippe Cluzet owns the travel agency, and at least our half of the building. He has for twenty years or so.”

“He runs the agency, yes. But he sold out his share of the property to a European consortium nearly a year ago.”

Blayne was shocked. And she was certain Claudia didn’t know, She would have said something if her Dad had sold the building.

“Cinzano is an important guy, and we’ve got him cold with what you saw.” The agent stroked his long ruddy brown moustache with the kind of satisfaction Blayne associated with pompous pseudo-intellectuals. “He’ll be looking at federal charges, including racketeering, as well as whatever the D.A. comes up with in connection with the homicide. And there’ll be the bodyguard’s murder trial. So you’re going to be the star prosecution witness in at least three trials.”

It began to sink in. She was going to be the key witness in the trial of a mafia underboss. Holy shit. That would put her in a world of danger . Blayne wanted to do the right thing, but at what cost?

“What if I don’t agree to testify?” she asked nervously.

Topping answered like he’d been expecting the question. “Then we would bring obstruction of justice charges against you at the very least. And Cinzano’s men would be out on the street looking for you, of course.”

Her head swam, and that feeling of foreboding rushed back. “He knows who I am,” she repeated, more to herself than the agents.

“Yeah,” Dombrowski said sympathetically. “You’d last maybe a week.”

“That was really pretty sloppy of him,” Topping said. “They never make threats like that themselves. He had to be awfully pissed at the way you compromised him. Plus he’s got a big ego. He thinks he’s untouchable.”

“But you got him cold, you said. So he can’t get out, right?” Blayne wanted some reassurance from these men that she wasn’t in as much danger as she feared. But she knew the answer even before she asked it.

“No, I don’t think the judge will grant bail on what we have on him,” Topping agreed.

“But we have to be honest and tell you that doesn’t mean you’re not in a great deal of danger,” Dombrowski said. “We’re going to have to keep you in protective custody.”

“What?” Blayne went rigid. She certainly hadn’t considered that. The mere words protective custody made her feel vaguely claustrophobic. She bristled at the thought of any loss of her independence.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll be locked up,” Dombrowski hastened to add. “It just means you’ll have to stay somewhere safe, not your house, and you’ll have to be under constant police protection. And you can’t go back to the travel agency, at least not for the foreseeable future.”

“I can’t go home? Can’t go back to my job?” This was getting worse by the minute. Her whole life was suddenly in upheaval. Blayne got a bad case of the shakes and suddenly felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. Without warning, she lost her burger and fries into the nearest wastebasket.