The Wrong Man (43 page)

Joel said, “So people closest to the mosque, like you, superstar, got the worst of it, but nobody got blown up. Just knocked off their feet. You came down on your head and had a nice five-hour nap.”

“The woman you were carrying out,” said Shauna, “the one in the wheelchair, broke her leg and has some scrapes and bruises, but she’s otherwise fine.”

“But everyone got out, Jason.” Lightner again. “You called Dr. Baraniq, apparently. The people in that mosque had about a twelve-minute start. Over a thousand people evacuated a mosque in just over ten minutes.”

A doctor came in and wanted to check me out. My vision was cloudy, and it hurt when I moved my eyes right to left. Or when I closed them. Or when I stood still. I noted that my left leg was heavily bandaged, my left arm less so.

“We’re going to leave you now.” Shauna pressed her lips against my forehead. She got off the bed. “C’mon, Joel.”

“See you later, tough guy.”

I opened my eyes again. Not everybody was leaving. Shauna was giving Tori and me some privacy. That felt… I don’t know what it felt like.

When the doctor finished with me, Tori came over and took the spot on the bed where Shauna had been. She took my hand in hers and brought it up to her face.

“Sleep,” she said. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Deidre Maley and I waited on the top floor of the Boyd Center at the reception area. Tom Stoller came walking down a hallway, unescorted for the first time in about a year, holding a small bag of personal possessions.

He looked at each of us briefly before his gaze went beyond us. That was Tom. Maybe it wouldn’t be someday.

The day after the bombing, Judge Nash declared a mistrial in the matter of
State v. Thomas Stoller
. Two days later, Wendy Kotowski called me with the news that the county attorney would not re-try Tom Stoller for the murder of Kathy Rubinkowski and was dismissing the case with prejudice. Randall Manning was dead, but there was more than sufficient evidence to suggest that Kathy Rubinkowski had uncovered evidence of the terrorist plot and had died because of it.

The media, hungry for any angles they could find on the December 7 events, had taken up Tom’s cause. He was featured on cable news programs and even
60 Minutes
. He was headed now for a private home that would give him the care he’d needed since he left Iraq. We hoped it wouldn’t be long before it was outpatient care, so he wouldn’t have to spend his life in some institution. For now, all that mattered was that things were finally starting to look up for the guy.

We took the elevator down together and stopped in the lobby. Deidre was going to drive Tom to the facility now, and I was heading back to the office.

Deidre had been on the verge of breaking down all morning, since she
first saw me. Apparently she wasn’t good with good-byes. I wasn’t, either, which was why I had made plans with Deidre to have lunch next week at Tom’s facility. It wasn’t good-bye. It was see you next week.

“Well, we did it,” I said, clapping my hands together. I put out my hand for Tom. “Lieutenant—”

Tom came forward and wrapped his arms around me tightly. I didn’t really know how to respond. This wasn’t how it usually worked with us. Deidre, who by now had turned on the waterworks, joined us and made it a three-person hug. It had been a pretty bumpy ride, no doubt, and Tom had defied some pretty serious odds.

Finally, Tom released me. He stepped back, nodded without looking at me, and walked away. Deidre kissed my cheek, said, “See you next week,” and followed after him.

I returned to my office after leaving Tom and Aunt Deidre. I was moving slowly these days. I lost a lot of skin on the left leg and some on the arm, too. And my left knee hadn’t been doing so well even before that time. The doctor at the hospital told me I probably could avoid surgery but I had to avoid stress on that knee for two months.

When I walked into my office, I found everything from the Stoller case in boxes. Marie, our office assistant, had apparently decided to put in a few hours of labor.

Someone had left today’s
Chronicle
on my desk. Yesterday, the U. S. attorney’s office had announced the indictments of Stanley Keane and eight others for murder, mayhem, and lots of other things you’re not supposed to do, like providing material assistance to a domestic terrorist organization. Manning had used the cover of his corporate entity, Global Harvest International, and Stanley Keane’s SK Tool and Supply, to slowly stockpile an astonishing amount of bomb material. They had armed two trucks, headed to the federal and state buildings, with one hundred bags each of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and three drums of liquid nitromethane. Each truck was part of a three-person team. The driver, traveling solo, would smash the truck into the building. The other two team members would follow in a car as a backup. Once the truck penetrated the building—if it didn’t detonate on impact—the driver and his partners were supposed to race to the nearest subway station, head underground, and try to avoid the blast. The driver would have set the five-minute fuse
in advance and the two-minute as well, so the driver was likely doing a suicide run.

The third truck—Manning’s truck—was different. It was armed with only fifty bags of ammonium nitrate, half the amount of explosives, because its target was smaller and less sturdy—a mosque as opposed to a multi-story building. And because Manning didn’t want to level the mosque. He wanted to destabilize it, just like the hotel in Adana, Turkey, where his family perished. He wanted people to run from the mosque, so he and his two helpers—Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer—could pick people off like the Adana terrorists did.

Manning, everyone had acknowledged, had been smart and disciplined. Had that bomb material been purchased in bulk, or had it been purchased by individuals, the federal government likely would have noticed. But under the cover of legitimate corporate transactions, and over time, Manning had stockpiled enough material to blow up ten more buildings besides those on December 7. Only yesterday the feds found the remaining stockpile in an underground facility several hundred miles away.

According to Stanley Keane, who was cooperating with the authorities, Randall Manning hadn’t expected to survive December 7. Nor had he expected his soldiers to do so. But the other two “brains” of the operation, Bruce McCabe and Stanley Keane, were expected to carry on the mission. The way Manning figured it, no roads led back to Keane or McCabe, and they’d be free to conduct further attacks. That, of course, was before he killed Bruce McCabe, for a reason that isn’t yet clear.

The federal government had missed all of this. They should have noticed that Summerset Farms was buying a hell of a lot more ammonium nitrate than it needed, but on paper the farm had the size to justify the purchase. Had anyone bothered to go out and notice how little of that acreage was actually being used for farmland, they would have become suspicious immediately.

And they missed the part about December 7 being the Islamic New Year, too. But for that much, I can’t really blame them. For one, Lee Tucker and that guy Osborne didn’t have much time to think about all of this. I’d only given them the info a few days earlier, and nobody knew for sure that December 7 was even the target date until the day before. Plus, the Islamic New Year isn’t some
major holiday for most Muslims. But it was close enough from Manning’s perspective, allowing him to combine a day that commemorated an attack on our soil with a day that was significant to Islam.

The good news for me was that my name had been kept out of it, as much as possible at least. The reporters know that I was Tom Stoller’s lawyer, but that’s the extent of it.

I saw a large three-ring binder in one of the boxes and didn’t immediately recognize it. Then I remembered. Joel Lightner had put together a dossier on the identity of Gin Rummy, the guy nobody could ever identify. For a short time during this investigation, it had been my focus, but Tori had correctly noted that it wasn’t really going to help me, in the end. Even if I identified the guy, it wasn’t like I could drag him into court and get him to confess. Finding out his identity wasn’t going to help me win Tom Stoller’s case.

It brought me back to Kathy Rubinkowski, the first one to speak up about suspicious activity taking place at Global Harvest. She was now a heroine in this entire saga, the one who started the ball rolling.

Her murder was technically unsolved. Everyone figured Randall Manning’s guys did it. Maybe one of those guys picked up ahead of time, Patrick Cahill or Ernie Dwyer. Maybe another one. Close enough. It wasn’t a critical detail in the scheme of things. I could tell the police about Gin Rummy, but to their mind, it would be like telling them the Easter Bunny did it. Nobody knew his identity, and nobody really cared anymore about Kathy Rubinkowski’s murder.

For no particular reason, I opened up Joel’s lengthy work. He had identified a number of people within and outside the Capparelli crime family who might qualify as Gin Rummy. Joel even had an executive summary, the kind of thing his corporate clients would like:

Right. I recalled that odd conversation with Lorenzo, right here in this office, when he first mentioned “Gin Rummy” to me.
A hit man?
I asked. Close enough, he said.
An assassin?
Right, he said. I never got the answer to my follow-up question: What’s the difference between a hit man and an assassin?

And I probably never would. Joel, for his part, had given his best guess in the following paragraph of his executive summary:

I finished reading the executive summary and let out a sigh. Some questions don’t get answered. Who knows? Maybe I’d keep looking for the elusive killer.

Or maybe, at some point, he’d come looking for me again.

Or maybe not. Maybe I was done with this. Maybe Tori was onto something in her apartment, the night before December 7. We could leave here. We could ditch everything and run away, start over. Was I ready to do that?

I looked at the photographs on my desk. One of my deceased wife, Talia, clutching our newborn child, Emily. Talia would always be the love of my life. That spot was permanently filled.

The other photo was Shauna and me, mugging for the camera in the bleachers last summer at a ball game. I stared into her frozen eyes and felt
my heartbeat ratchet up. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what
we
meant. I wasn’t sure I had the courage to find out.

Exhale.

I decided not to confront that particular topic at this time and, instead, flip through Joel’s report. I’d had enough drama in my life for one year.

Peter Gennaro Ramini waited on the corner, his hands stuffed in his coat, watching his breath freeze. The town car arrived on time. Say this for Donnie and his brother Mooch, they were punctual.

He got in and felt a spasm of nerves, which went nicely with the stench of fried food.

Donnie kept him in suspense, which was annoying but sometimes part of the drill. He was really just a glorified delivery boy, but he liked to feel important.

Finally, after the town car had traveled several blocks, Donnie patted Ramini’s knee.

“Even Paulie knows when to pull back,” he said. “He says to me, get this: ‘We kill the prick now and we paint a target on our back.’”

Ramini deflated with relief. He’d hoped that Paulie would see the sheer stupidity of killing the man who had helped thwart a terrorist attack on this city. Even if the general public didn’t know the extent of what he did, the feds sure did. If they whacked Kolarich now, the feds would rewrite the Patriot Act to target the Mafia.

“He understands that we’re in the clear now,” Donnie went on. “We dodged a bullet. We go after Kolarich now, we go right back to being in the soup.”

“Great. Thanks, Don.”

“Now, he did kill Sal and Augie.”

Actually, he didn’t, but Ramini had been forced to lie about that to
Paulie and Donnie. The Capparellis couldn’t know what really happened in that alley with Kolarich.

“So what does that mean?” Ramini asked.

The town car was now pulling back to the same corner where Ramini had jumped in.

Donnie said, “It means we don’t forget. It means we wait. It means, someday, the lawyer might get a visit from us. It means Mr. Jason Kolarich, Esquire, better never stop watching his back.”

I was the last in the office, past six-thirty. I was looking out the window at the cityscape when I heard her footsteps down the hallway, the familiar
clack
of her boots.

“Hey,” Tori said.

“Hey, yourself.” Down below, Christmas shoppers filled the streets. I used to love Christmas when I was a kid, because it was one of the only days that my dad was in a good mood. And it was the only time when our family seemed normal. That used to matter so much to me, when I was a kid—feeling like I was normal. Feeling like I belonged.

“Did you mean what you said before?” I asked, my forehead planted against the glass window, still looking down at the street. “About us just leaving this city? Leaving everything behind?”