52. Dante

Chapter 52

Dante

“ H ow is she?” I asked the moment Foster walked into the interrogation room.

“Doing good,” he replied. “At least, she was when I spoke to her.”

His words gave me no comfort and I lifted my wrist to look at my watch. “Fucking four more hours.”

He nodded. “Hudgens is a chump. He knows he’s not going to get anything out of you so why go through the trouble?”

“He’s not trying to get anything out of me,” I replied.

Foster paused for a moment and he looked up, the hot coffee in his cup had steamed his glasses. I looked at him with irritation. He was good, but he was no Marco Leone. Zola’s father had foresight and an intuitive intelligence that was almost impossible to find in anyone else.

He set the cup down and cleaned his glasses with a white handkerchief.

At that moment, the door was pushed open, and Hudgens came in along with another stoic-faced agent. He dragged out a chair, turned it backward, and sat before us while the agent stood by the door and acted tough. I watched him closely and looked forward to the performance he was about to put on.

“How was your night?” he asked. “It’s no county jail, but I think we did our best. No blankets, but you didn’t need one, did you?”

I lifted my wrist and pretended to look at my watch.

“You’re impatient to leave, I get it, but it's not going to be that easy for you.”

“It is going to be that easy,” Foster said.

Hudgens turned to him. “I’m in a lot more control here than you think.”

Foster smiled. “Sure, that’s why you had to fabricate some nonsense to keep my client here for twenty-four hours. We let that one slide so you could at least save some face, but any longer and you can kiss your career goodbye.”

Hudgens feigned an exaggerated shiver. Then he stared at Foster menacingly. “You need to excuse us.”

Foster smiled pleasantly and took a sip of his coffee. “Sorry, but you don’t speak to my client without me being present.”

“That wasn’t a suggestion,” Hudgens said before he turned to me and looked at me meaningfully.

I knew what was happening. I knew the kind of officer he was. I had encountered him so many times in the past and we had our dealings and I guess now was the time to speak off the books.

I locked eyes with Foster and gave a nod. He stared at me, his eyebrows furrowing into a frown, making it very clear he wasn’t happy at all about being dismissed.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

He didn’t like it, but he understood that he didn’t have a choice so he silently got to his feet and took his leave. I returned my attention to Hudgens, and he smiled at me.

He switched off the tape recorder. “Let’s talk off the record.”

I could sense the trap from a mile away. “Nothing is ever off the record,” I said, glancing at the hidden surveillance cameras in the corners of the room.

“Look,” he said with fake friendliness. “We’ve had our run-ins several times in the past, but things have always been cordial between us. I’m hoping it can be the same this time around.”

It was the same conversation over and over again and frankly, I was getting sick of it. He saw my irritation but still waited for a response.

“Loss was nothing to me back then. Only monetary but not this time around.”

“What do you mean?” he asked eagerly. “There’s more at stake? Like a person?”

“Yes,” I replied.

His eyes glittered. “As far as I know you don’t have any family. So … it must mean … a woman.”

I stared at him and thought of the truth and falsehood in his words. “I did have a family. Marco Leone was my family, which is why the lie your organization is trying to put forward that I would do anything to hurt his daughter is so ridiculous.”

“We never said you would hurt her,” he said. “All we said was you might have kidnapped her.”

He pushed his chair closer to me and stared deep into my eyes.

“I’ve always considered you an ally because you’ve always made things easy for me. Throw me another bone, will you? Let’s both get out of this unscathed.”

I stared right at him. “Can you guarantee her safety?”

He lifted his right hand and swore. “You have my word.”

I smiled with amusement.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked.

I had nothing else to say and knew that one slip of the tongue and he would officially be sending me into custody, so I kept my comments to myself.

“If you don’t cooperate you will jeopardize your case. I’ll make sure of that,” he threatened. “But cooperate and I’ll give you a way out. The DA will be itching to give you nothing less than twenty years, but I’ll put in a good word and get you ten. Good behavior means you’ll only do five years.”

I turned to him then and shook my head in wonder. “You’re trying to get an innocent man to take the fall?”

He laughed out loud. “Ha! Ha! Innocent man. Come on, Moretti. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I know more about you than I know about my own son.”

“In that case, you should know you’re wasting your time right now.”

The ringing of a cell phone reverberated in the room and I was happy for the reprieve. Listening to him was beginning to give me a headache.

His colleague, who had been silent all that time, answered the phone, actually grunted into it, and then returned it to his pocket.

“There's news,” he said.

Hudgens kept his gaze on me, a sick smile playing at the corner of his lips. “What news?”

“Leone’s daughter,” he said in a dull voice. “She’s just been sighted going into her old apartment building about five minutes ago.”

There was surprise in Hudgens’s eyes at the information, but there was no way I could hide the shock and annoyance in mine.

“Jackpot,” Hudgens gloated with delight.